Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link This Wicked Fate by Kalynn Bayron is the sequel to This Poison Heart, her gothic YA fantasy filled with Black girl magic, Greek mythology, and impressive action. This book picks up directly after This Poison Heart and deals with Briseis trying to grapple with the events and betrayals of the last book. Faced withRead More
Maggie reviews Wild and Wicked Things by Francesca May
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link With a frenetic, Roaring Twenties-type vibe, Wild and Wicked Things by Francesca May is set in a post-WWI society where half of society is trying desperately to recover from the devastation of the Great War, and the other half is trying desperately to party hard enough that they forget thereRead More
Maggie reviews This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron follows Briseis, a Black teenager who lives with her two moms in Brooklyn, helping them run their flower shop. Briseis has plant magic and can grow plants from a touch, but she doesn’t know the limits of her powers or how to controlRead More
Rachel reviews Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link Stunning, poignant, and totally unputdownable, Julia Armfield’s debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea (Picador 2022) is one of my favourite queer novels of 2022! Our Wives Under the Sea is a dual-perspective narrative that follows both Miri and her wife Leah. Miri’s chapters narrate Leah’s return from a deep-sea missionRead More
Meagan Kimberly reviews Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth, illustrated by Sara Lautman
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link The book starts with The Story of Mary MacLane, a real-life figure in writing. It’s this book that the girls of Brookhants School for Girls center their Plain Bad Heroines Society around. But when three girls die and the book is found at both death scenes, it soonRead More
Rachel reviews A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link If you’re a fan of paranormal retellings, historical fiction, and poetic writing, S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood is the perfect read. The novel is an innovative and refreshing retelling of Dracula, told from the perspective of one of Dracula’s three brides—infamous in the novel as the licentious, erotic, lust-filled womenRead More
Rachel reviews Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link A dark, haunting, gothic novel, Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) is a delightfully dark queer book with a complex and fun premise that was right up my alley. Set across two separate timelines, the first begins in 1902 Rhode Island at the Brookhants School for Girls. Two students,Read More
Kayla Bell reviews Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology edited by Celine Frohn
Gothic fiction is my jam. I love the slowly building sense of dread that is the cornerstone of the genre. If I could have the job of any fictional character, it would be the creepy groundskeeper of the haunted manors in gothic ghost stories. I also (as you can imagine from me writing for thisRead More
Where to Start Reading Lesbian Gothic
Haunted mansions! Thunder and lightning! Brooding antiheroes! Women running down corridors wearing long white gowns! I love the tropes of Gothic literature: they’re campy, they’re spooky, they’re sexy. What more could you possibly want from a genre? Well, sapphic romance, obviously. As it happens, the Gothic is a pretty gay genre to begin with. ItsRead More
Bee reviews Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology edited by Celine Frohn
This book had me in two words: queer. Gothic. I have long-held passions in both areas. The gothic is the realm of the outsider, the rejected, the monstrous. It lends itself to queer interpretation–and that is mostly what queer gothic is. Just interpretation. The height of gothic literature was, of course, the 18th and 19th Centuries, beginning with TheRead More