Horror – Marked for Plot

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.

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

Interview With The Vampire – A Turning Point in Vampire Stories

Interview with The Vampire has been on my read list for a while. Actually, I’ve been interested in exploring the history of vampires a bit more deeply once I realized that the three original vampire novels (The Vampyre, Carmilla, and Dracula) are all super queer. Interview with the Vampire represented a shift in how modern vampires were written. Rice placed them at the center of the tale instead of as an antagonist to be vanquished. As with its predecessors, it’s also super queer-coded. I think I came into the novel with incorrect assumptions about what this book would be, which led to this being a more disappointing read than I was hoping for. In the end I enjoyed it, but I wish discussion about the book was more accurate to the reading experience.

Read If Looking For: musings on the nature of immortality, immoral protagonists, interesting monologues

Avoid If Looking For: two gay-coded dads raising their vampiric daughter together, main characters who didn’t own slaves, traditional plot structures

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

As I continue exploring whether or not horror is the genre for me, Stephen Graham Jones has flitted in and out of my orbit. I had mixed feelings about Mapping the Interior, but Buffalo Hunter Hunter not only had glowing reviews, but also has one of my favorite covers of all time. There’s a lot to love here, but I found myself wishing it were a lot shorter than its actual length. Mixed feelings overall, but Stephen Graham Jones is definitely an author I want to read more of, because the parts of this book that worked really worked.

Read if: you like epistolary horror and framing narratives, enjoy framing narratives and/or epistolary formats, don’t care if the dog dies

Avoid if: you prefer books that get to the point right away, want traditional vampire representation, have an aversion to graphic depictions of violence – including historical events

Comparable Works: The Route of Ice and Salt, The Black Hunger, The Woods all Black

The Route of Ice and Salt

A Mexican horror novel following a ship captain of a ship transporting vampires, playing off elements of Dracula (which I haven’t read). It’s an excellent translation, and a dip into the more Literary side of horror than I normally go for. This was a good reminder of why I was a bad English major in college, and why genre fiction is my happy place over Literature. However, I’m glad I read this, and I think it’s much better at engaging with vampires’ historic associations with queerness in interesting ways than most other queer vampire books I’ve read.

Read if Looking For: intense focus on internal monologue, dream sequences, horror of the unseen, prose like liquid silk

Avoid if Looking For: direct plot or prose, ethical gays, paranormal romance elements, cute rats, protagonists who don’t sexually harass people, vampires with major speaking roles

But Not Too Bold

Novellas have become one of my go-to library checkouts. With my limited budget, dropping $15 on a book that will take me a single evening to consume is a tough choice to make. However, I love the length and format, and I find that authors tend to be much more focused on what makes their work special in novellas. But Not Too Bold is an excellent example of that trend, and it put Cabaret in Flames (Hache Pueyo’s upcoming release) on my radar.

Read if you Like: translated books, fast-paced horror, creepy spider monsters, tidy endings, descriptions of opulent mansions

Avoid if You Dislike: human/monster love stories, depictions of spiders, characters without self-preservation instincts, fairy tale ‘retellings’ far from the source material

Several People are Typing

Put simply, this book is a shot of adrenaline. I want to give a big shout out to u/diazeugma for recommending one of my new favorites during the r/fantasy pride month event in June. It took me a while to pull the trigger on this workplace comedy/horror book about a man stuck in the Slack chat of his workplace, a PR firm. When I did, I consumed the book in around 4 hours. At 250 pages, this reads a lot more like a novella because of how sparse the pages are. It’s not a book without flaws, but this book contains a level of joy few authors are able to capture.

Read if You Like: The Office meets Twilight Zone, comedy from the absurd, the distillation of existential dread, captivating characters, train wrecks in slow motion

Avoid if You Dislike: not getting physical descriptions of characters, mysteries that never get explained, strong romance plotlines

Hungerstone

Queerness and vampirism go hand in hand throughout literature. While I’m not well versed in the classics, The Book Eaters and Heart of Stone both showcased how vampire stories can be gripping in both romantic and horror spheres. Hungerstone is essentially a take on Carmilla (which I haven’t read), with a special focus on the main character’s relationship with her own agency. I think fans of gothic horror will love it, and is a good option as a starter to the genre if you like stories with a more internal focus (whereas something like Mexican Gothic or A Botanical Daughter would be better starting points for more plot focused stories). However, its much less vampire-forward than I would have expected.

Read if You Like: melancholy, living in a character’s head, depictions of abusive relationships and the effects of patriarchal structures

Avoid if Looking For: plot focused stories, lead characters who drive the story, a heavy focus on classic elements of vampire stories

Mister B. Gone

I’ve known the name of Clive Barker for a while now. Hellraiser is influential enough that even someone who absolutely despises horror movies knows its basic imagery. He’s an author lauded as a pioneering queer writer and an author I had no intention of touching with a 10 foot pole. Mister B. Gone was recommended to me by a friend who swore it was their favorite book of all time though, and so I took the plunge into this dark comedy. It wasn’t a perfect book, but the writing was engrossing enough that I’m curious to try some of his books that are more widely lauded.

Read if You Like: Fourth-wall breaking, morally bankrupt (but likeable) protagonists, humorous asides, demons and angels

Avoid if You Dislike: books without a strong A-Plot, engrossing climaxes, straightforwardly gay characters

The Black Hunger

As part of pride month, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and discussing about how avoiding problematic tropes can lead to more problematic tropes. Bury Your Gays (other than being a Chunk Tingle novel I very much want to read) is a classic example of authors, playwrights, and screenwriters killing off queer characters as a way of saying this person was bad and immoral sort of like how literally every Disney Villain dies due to their own character flaws. That trend is bad and problematic, but its backlash led to such predictable happy endings that I didn’t get the same beautiful tragedy and sadness in queer speculative fiction that I could find in cis/het works. Thankfully, I think this is being seen and rectified, mostly by queer authors themselves. I’m all for tragic gays making a comeback.

The Black Hunger is a great example of how bad endings for queer characters isn’t problematic on its own. It’s only bad when used as a way to demonize queer folks. And while I had some issues with the book, I had a great time with it as part of my continued exposure therapy to the horror genre after being traumatized by watching The Mummy when I was five (I still don’t like beetles to this day). Unfortunately, this book struggled in other areas, mostly related to depictions of Buddhism, which will rightly be a dealbreaker for many.

Read if Looking For: older gay male representation, evil cultists (and Russians), far too many teeth, slow burn gothic horror

Avoid if You Dislike: multiple narrators, Epistolary novels that don’t read like letters, authors taking liberties with real-world religions without getting it quite right

Don’t Let the Forest In

Despite being a middle/high school English teacher, I don’t actually read much Middle Grade or Young Adult works these days. Sometimes I’ll preview a book for class, but rarely for personal pleasure. Oddly, the vast majority of YA that I read is horror, despite it not really being my favorite genre (it’s growing on me, I promise!). I picked up Don’t Let the Forest In in as some first steps to introduce more aro/ace representation into my reading diet. Overall, I thought this was a good book, and one that I’m glad I read. While I think some elements will frustrate readers who primarily pursue adult books, I think it’s got enough good things going on to be worth recommending to a broad variety of people.

Read if You Like: unreliable narrators, endings that stick the landing, impactful twists, creepy forest monsters

Avoid if You Dislike: archetypical side characters/set dressing, romantic tension derived lack of effective communication, slow pacing