I’ve been trying to spend the fall reading Gothic fiction, and as Halloween approaches, Johanna van Veen’s queer Gothic horror novel, My Darling Dreadful Thing (Poisoned Pen Press, 2024), is the perfect book for this time of year! Veen’s debut novel follows Roos Beckman in the 1950s. Roos has a spirit companion, Ruth, has been dead forRead More
Grief and the Gay Supernatural Alliance: Jasmine is Haunted by Mark Oshiro
Jasmine Garza is tired of moving, she’s tired of switching schools, and she’s tired of her Mami not believing her. Ever since her father died, she’s been haunted—but not by him. By a ghost who wants to ruin her life, apparently, because it keeps getting her into trouble. She’s tried to talk to her MamiRead More
A Twisty Sapphic Spiritualist Con: Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkins
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Carmella Lowkins’s new historical novel, Spitting Gold (Atria Books 2024), is a fabulously atmospheric story with a twisting plot that keeps you guessing until the very end! Spitting Gold is set in nineteenth-century Paris. Baroness Sylvie Devereux has worked tirelessly for years to distance herself from herRead More
Ghosts or Post-Partum Depression? Graveyard of Lost Children by Katrina Monroe
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! After giving birth to her daughter, Olivia is struggling—not just with being a first-time mother, but mostly from being haunted. She hears voices whispering terrible things to her, a black-haired ghost is following her in her nightmares, and her body is deteriorating rapidly fromRead More
A Southern Gothic Coming of Age: Something Kindred by Ciera Burch
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! When I picked this up, I was expecting a horror novel. And that makes sense, because it does have a lot of ghosts in it. But the ghosts are more a part of the setting than the plot; while they’re literally present in theRead More
Haunted by the Past: She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Horror is a very broad genre, and, I am inclined to say, a particularly personal one, seeing as what scares one person may not scare another, or, on the other hand, it might scare them too much. I myself love a good haunted house,Read More
A Genre-Bending Haunted Bookstore Story: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! I kept hearing people rave about this book when it was new. I heard it was a cozy read about someone working in a bookstore haunted by the ghost of a customer. So imagine my surprise when the book begins with the main characterRead More
A Literal Dead Poets’ Society: All That Consumes Us by Erica Waters
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! The days have started getting shorter as darkness takes up more and more space every day. The evening air isn’t quite cold enough to keep you inside, but every gust of wind chills to the bone, and the woods behind my apartment are filledRead More
10 Sapphic YA Horror Books to Read In October
With fall finally here, you might be looking for some spooky books to read in October and to get you in the perfect eerie mood. Featuring ghosts, aliens, demons, and zombies, these books are a great way to get in touch with your sinister side and prepare yourself for the best night of the year:Read More
A Dramatic Supernatural YA Horror Read: Here Lies Olive by Kate Anderson
Bookshop.org Affiliate Link Here Lies Olive by Kate Anderson is a young adult fiction novel that follows sixteen-year-old Olive as she navigates unwitting friendships to save a ghost that she accidentally-on-purpose brings into the material plane in order to find out if the Nothing that she saw when she “died” after an allergic reaction is reallyRead More