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
Danika reviews Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado
The act of interacting with text—that is to say, of reading—is that of inserting one’s self into what is static and unchanging so that it might pump with fresh blood. Having read this introduction, I hope you will enter into Carmilla thusly, using your fingertips and mouth and mind to locate the lacunae where LeFanuRead More
Babusha reviews the Kate Kane series by Alexis Hall
Look, the books I’m talking about here were released at a time when – I thought I was straight I thought Twilight was the epitome of vampire romance. So after four years of going through some intense self-reflection and some brief boycotting of vampires altogether, I realised that I still loved vampires–I just like themRead More
Mary Springer reviews Five Moons Rising by Lise MacTague
Malice, known as Mary Alice to her family, is a trained hunter for paranormal creatures. Ruri is the beta werewolf of her pack, has been around for a couple of centuries, and is not a werewolf to be trifled with. Both their lives are shaken when Ruri’s pack is taken over by a violent, lonerRead More
Mary Springer reviews Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
This review contains spoilers. Given that this was written in 1872 by a presumably heterosexual cisgender man, I was not expecting a happy ending. This is the story of a lesbian vampire preying on an innocent young woman and being killed by said young woman’s father and her father’s friends (yes, all men). This isn’tRead More
Alexa reviews Into the Mystic Volume 3 by NineStar Press
Her ghost had once told Clotho that no proper ghost story has a happy ending, because ghosts don’t end. It’s no secret that I have a soft spot for fantasy, paranormal and fairytales, so of course I had to pick up an anthology that has nine F/F stories with paranormal elements. While the stories hadRead More
Cara reviews Ex-Wives of Dracula by Georgette Kaplan
This is one of the best lesbian vampire books I’ve ever read. While not without its flaws, it stands out for the development of its two protagonists, its prose, its humor, and its well-developed setting. Mindy and Lucia start off by rekindling their childhood friendship on Mindy’s pizza routes, in the easy way that friendships develop when you’re thatRead More
Danika reviews Better Off Red by Rebekah Weatherspoon
I don’t read a lot of romance or erotica, but I figured that this month, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I would give the genre another shot. I was immediately intrigued by the premise of this one: vampire sorority sisters? I’m in. And for the most part, this is exactly the kind of smutty,Read More
Danika reviews Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Carmilla is a lesbian vampire novella that predates Dracula by over 25 years. I had been meaning to pick this book up for years, just based off that description, but I wanted to save it for an October read. This year I finally got around to it, and I think it makes the perfect quick sapphicRead More