Bisexual – Page 2 – Marked for Plot

The Wolf and His King – Dripping with Intentionality

This book was a match made in heaven for me. Queer yearning? Check. Unconventional and bespoke prose? Check. Thematic depth without being preachy? Check. The Wolf and His King I’ve read in a long time. I didn’t love how they tackled writing the ending, but The Wolf and His King is a book I will be happily shoving into the hands of my friends.

As a note, those looking for a traditional Romantasy story will be disappointed. There are absolutely romantic elements to the tale, but you won’t find the story focusing on Bisclavret and the King’s developing relationship. The book is more interested in each of their personal journeys, despite their mutual affection for each other. Like other books that are sort-of-technically Romances that don’t read like most books in the genre, The Wolf and His King is best viewed as a book that happens to include some romance elements, which I think will help temper some misplaced expectations based on how the book has been pitched.

The Premise
Bisclavret lives in a self-imposed exile. He turns into a wolf against his will, and fears that venturing to court will put himself and others in danger. When the King dies and the new King returns from his own exile though, Bisclavret has no choice to but venture forth and swear fealty to the King. The King, meanwhile, is awash with self-doubt and a search for meaning about what type of King he’d like to be. He is taken immediately with Bisclavret, and the two form a close bond while each struggles to find a good path forward with their life. And the Wolf? The Wolf is always present, waiting to come out.

Read If Looking For: dreamlike prose, characters exploring their own self-doubt, a marriage of theme and structure

Avoid If Looking For: critical examinations of monarchies, fleshed out female characters, leads who are proactive

Comparable Media: Song of Achilles, This is How You Lose the Time War, Spear (by Nicola Griffith)

The Iron Garden Sutra – Spaceship Gothic

I’ve been feeling like 2026 is going to be a very good year for books featuring queer men. The Iron Garden Sutra is my first of the lot, and I enjoyed it a lot! The book has a bit of a weak opening 100 pages, but once it hit its stride I loved it. Unconventional Gothic settings have been growing more and more on me, and this book did a great job of blending a tense atmosphere with the portrait of a man facing an existential crisis. Kind of feels like a darker, more serious Becky Chambers book. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it sure was for me.

The Premise:
Iris is a monk of the Starlit Order. He is a Vessel. As he travels the universe, he performs funeral rites, comforts those about to die, and helps their loved ones mourn. His newest assignment is to perform last rites for a Generation Ship that has turned up after it’s long voyage and, like all other Generation Ships, don’t have any living humans aboard. He is greeted by carpets of moss, curtains of vines, and a cohort of academics intent on studying and exploring the ship. Yan, an engineer who specializes in AI negotiations, has a special hatred for Vessels; Iris is of course forced to spend some uncomfortably close time with him. It becomes clear that someone – or something – doesn’t want them to leave alive.

Read If Looking For: haunted spaceships, characters coming to terms with death and mortality, explorations of autonomy and personhood, the crumbling of religious conviction

Avoid If Looking For: flawless prose, logical worldbuilding, characters who can put the pieces of the puzzle together

Comparable Media: A Psalm for the Wild Built, Mexican Gothic, A Botanical Daughter

The Fall of Kings – Political Intrigue in Medieval Academia

I finally got around to reading the third – and final – novel in the Riverside series. While it is a sequel, they can really be read in any order or can stand alone just fine. In this entry, we trade swordplay for academic debate. Other than the shift from sword to pen however, the structural DNA of The Fall of Kings fits with its predecessors. Expect gorgeous prose, political intrigue, problematic queer leads, and lots of guys cheating on their wives.

The Premise:
Theron Campion is the heir to House Tremontaine, but he’s more interested in his various affairs than learning anything of politics. His newest infatuation is Basil St. Cloud, a Doctor of Ancient History who is angling for the Horn Chair and a significant pay bump. As the two kick off an affair, Basil begins to grow more and more infatuated with the idea that the ancient Wizards actually were magic, and that the Kings had a magical connection with the land. Theron, funnily enough, is a descendent of both the ancient Kings and the Duke who slew the last one. Their romance, politics (family, academy, city council), and emotions get swept up as part of the newest chapter of a very, very old story.

Read If Looking For: the cluttered posturing of university professors, morally and emotionally dubious characters, slow pacing, the importance of idle gossip

Avoid If Looking For: fleshed out female characters, the swordfights of earlier Riverside books, a book where you understand how the magic works

Comparable Media: Greenwode, The Goblin Emperor, Downton Abbey

Hench – Revenge is Best Served With Excel Spreadsheets

I don’t do many rereads, but when I saw the audiobook for Hench was available without a wait time, I couldn’t resist checking it out. Villain, the sequel, releases later this year, and I will definitely be putting it on my reading list. I think I’m a little more hesitant about some of the thematic work in Hench than I was during my first read, but this is a rock solid revenge story that stands out in a cluttered Superhero landscape.

The Premise
Anna is a Hench, but really she just does data entry and analysis. When her first time working in the field goes wrong though, she finds herself with a terrible injury, a grudge against the world’s most powerful superhero, and a desire to start revealing the great harm that ‘heroes’ do to society. She tumbles down a rabbit hole that gives her with the resources to turn her from a minor supporter for villains into a person feared and despised by ever super in the world.

Read If: clever characters work for you, unreliable narrators are a plus, you think iguanas deserve only the best

Avoid If: you dislike critiques of policing, body horror makes you squeamish, you demand nuanced and thorough themes

Comparable Media: The Boys, Watchmen, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

Asunder – An Episodic Eldritch Fantasy

I think I’ve taken Asunder off my TBR about three times as I try to keep it at manageable levels. Invariably, I see a review that piques my interest enough for it to go back onto the pile. If I’m honest, the cover art put me off. It’s unfair, I know (don’t judge a book by its cover and all that), but Asunder’s cover is as beautiful as it is misleading. When I opened the pages, I assumed I’d be walking into a well-written romance with a teenage year old lead. Instead I walked through the dreams of dead gods as a 29 year old woman scrabbles to retain her personhood in the face of uncaring worlds. It will make you feel small and wonder and disgust and hopeless. If you’re willing to give it the space to breathe, it will take your breath away.

Elevator Pitch:
Karys is a Deathspeaker. In exchange for the ability to peer through the Veneer to see magic and talk to the recently deceased, she has sold her soul to an eldritch abomination with three faces and a body made of wings. During a job that’s gone horribly wrong, she stumbles across Ferain, an ambassador from her country’s former occupiers, who was attacked while returning home. To save his life and make a massive amount of money, she anchors his soul to her shadow. Getting him out proves to be much more difficult than getting him in, however, and the Saints of the eldritch gods she serves have taken an interest in this man. Her journey forces her into contact with a variety of haunted landscapes, uncaring gods, and ruthless criminals.

Read if: you like eldritch beings who bend reality to their will, episodic horror/fantasy hybrids, you want to feel the weight of selling your soul

Avoid if: you want a quick moving plot or dynamic action scenes, agreeable protagonists, straightforward romantasy

Comparable Media: The City of Stairs, Spirited Away, Wizard of the Pigeons

Kalyna the Soothsayer – Political Fantasy with a Sense of Humor

One of my favorite things to do is read books nobody is talking about other than a few people who relentlessly hype it. Kalyna the Soothsayer was brought to my attention by u/RheingoldRiver over on the Fantasy subreddit. I’m a bit sad that it took me so long to finally pick this book up, but I really enjoyed it! It’s got a good amount of political intrigue, a delightfully unreliable narrator, and a setting that feels just weird enough to be noticed without distracting from the corruptive nature of power or xenophobic social orders. It’s not a comedy, but it’s got a relentlessly dry sense of humor. It isn’t epic fantasy, but the stakes are high. It’s not a crime novel, but our protagonist’s string of cons and lies were entertaining and filled with tension. It doesn’t quite hit my ‘all time favorites’ list, but it’s good enough that I’ve already put in an order for the sequel.

Elevator Pitch
Kalyna is from everywhere, but belongs nowhere. She is powerless in a family of soothsayers. Her ‘prophecies’ rely on guesswork and rigging the odds. She’s catches the attention of the Prince of Rotfelsen, an underground nation. She and her family find themselves kidnapped and forcibly placed in the Prince’s service right when assassination plots against the King are on the rise. She must figure out how to escape without killing herself, her loving father, or her viper of a grandmother. Until then, she’s got to fake some fortunes for a paranoid prince and hope things don’t go too sideways in the meantime.

Read if Looking for: long cons, a bucket of assassination attempts, characters using nontypical weapons, Jewish-coded protagonists, chaotic bisexuals

Avoid if Looking For: kind and sympathetic nobility, fight scenes with consequences, supportive grandparents, long chapters

Comparable Reads: The Justice of Kings, A Mask of Mirrors, The Blacktongue Thief

Lifelode – A Domestic Fantasy to Chew On

I am so happy that I read Lifelode. It isn’t a perfect book, but I love how it defies easy comparisons and pushed boundaries of fantasy in the 2000s structurally and thematically. It’s got delightfully weird worldbuilding and, if pressed, would use One Hundred Years of Solitude as the closest comparison I’ve read (though even that isn’t right). More selfishly, it’s also probably one of the best books I’ve read for a book club, simply because I think Lifelode makes so many bold choices that will spark interesting discussion. Certainly my views here on how Walton handled theme don’t seem to be universally shared amongst those who, like me, ended up reading far ahead for our midway discussion. Lifelode isn’t necessarily a dense book, but there’s a lot of interesting choices here which set a great foundation for discussion whether you loved or hated the directions the story took.

The Premise:
Applekirk is a rural farming town run by a lord and his family, who live in a large manor. Taveth is one of the four adults of the marriage, committed to maintaining the house. One of her husbands is Lord, another manages the sheep and farms. Meanwhile Chayra, the other wife of the house, has found joy in throwing pots. Their lives are thrown out of routine with the arrival of a flirtatious travelling scholar, a meanspirited ancestor to one of Taveth’s husbands, and a priestess of the goddess of marriage who has been sent to bring said ancestor to the goddess’ justice. Just as important, however, is the harvest and all preparations it requires.

Read if Looking For: books without easy comparisons, celebration of traditionally feminine work, Gods as hiveminds, reimagined family structures

Avoid if you Dislike: pastoral settings, relationship drama, complex family trees, peas, petty characters

Stalking Darkness (Nightrunner #2)

If you’d like to see my review for book 1 in this gay epic(ish) Fantasy series from the 90s, see Luck in the Shadows.

It’s been a long time since I read a Mass Market Paperback, or enjoyed the smell of an old book. While my hand suffered some cramps during the final 100 pages, it was a nice hit of nostalgia for what reading used to be like. I enjoy reading on e-readers well enough, but the larger-sized paperbacks and hardbacks of our modern printing era are definitely more comfortable to curl up with. That said, I miss how inexpensive books used to be!

Anyways, this was a great sequel to a great opening of a series. As with book 1, be prepared for elements that feel dated and gross in our modern era. This book was a lot less of that than the original though, especially since I’d accepted and and compartmentalized from my significant qualms about how Flewelling set up the relationship between Alec and Seregil in book 1.

The Premise:
This book is a hodgepodge of Alec and Seregil’s adventures as the growing threat of war with Pleminar develops. Seregil goes hunting for more dangerous necromantic relics, Alec starts to do spy jobs solo, and they both keep feeling like people are following them. Alec learns about his past, we get a cryptic prophecy, and the villains make their move. Lots of classic fantasy elements, though this book continues to place a heavier focus on political or urban exploration elements than extended travel across fantastic terrains or grand battles you see in other epic fantasy works of the time like The Wheel of Time.

Read if Looking For: political intrigue, brewing wars, so many dreams, angsty pining, a sudden awareness of breasts and pectorals

Avoid if Looking For: books without rape or torture, lots of female characters, moral ambiguity

Shadow Life

We so rarely get to see older protagonists in fantasy and science fiction. Those we do get to see tend to be retired adventurers, war generals, or all-powerful magicians. Not old ladies who are struggling with bladder control and nosy children. Shadow Life was a breath of fresh air. It’s a moody and atmospheric graphic novel, and a slice of life very much outside the norm for genre fiction. As a novel, I think it would be unremarkable but enjoyable. In comic format however, I found it rather entrancing.

The Premise
After sensing evil spirits in the retirement home her children arranged for her, Kumiko has struck out on her own. She’s got her own apartment, a friendly neighbor, and a nagging sense that something is following her. As Death’s Shadow haunts her every step, Kumiko seeks independence in a world that wants to control her. Her journey even brings her back into contact with an old lover, a new vacuum salesperson, and away from her daughter’s nagging phone calls.

Read if Looking For: dark cozy, bisexual old ladies, shadow cats, characters with selective hearing, slice of life stories

Avoid if Looking For: plot-focused books, strong horror or fantasy elements, clear thematic takeaways

The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg

Mike Karpa wrote one of my favorite books from last year, and I knew I wanted to try more by him in 2026. Unfortunately, Red Dot is his only speculative fiction novel. I don’t read much non-Romance contemporary novels, but I chose The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg as one of my 12 books to prioritize this year. The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg won’t top my best-of lists, it solidified that Karpa is an author I will continue to read, and I desperately hope he’s got more stories in the works for the future.

The Premise
Casey and Roger are worried about making ends meet while living as lavish a life as possible. Roger is a former hit-screenwriter who now teaches Film courses at ritzy colleges. Casey runs a struggling localization business and is trying to get her daughter Abby into an exclusive elementary school. Demmy is Roger’s daughter from his first wife, who enjoys gossip and high school politics at her Japanese immersion school. Pretty much everyone has at least one secret (other than Abby, who just wants to watch Lizzo music videos), and nobody’s particularly happy with the state of their lives. You wouldn’t know it from the outside, however.

Read if Looking For: insightful prose, dysfunctional families, insufferable lead characters, 5 year-olds obsessed with Lizzo

Avoid if Looking For: witty banter, fast-paced plots, diverse characters, endings as messy as the beginnings