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Check out these truly horrific and downright devilish scary stories from LGBTQ+ writers.
Queer horror has existed almost as long as the horror genre itself. Consider Sheridan La Fanu’s Carmilla—one of the world’s first vampire books. It is festering with sapphic references and queer poetics, despite being published in the nineteenth century.
And in 2024 we’re happy to celebrate all things horror and all things queer—loud and proud.
These queer horror books are modern representations of queer voices in horror fiction and nonfiction that will have you wondering what may be hiding in the closet.
Camp Damascus
In Camp Damascus, Chuck Tingle weaves together the monsters of our nightmares with the real-life horrors occurring in the mundane world to create a disturbing and captivating story of demons, conversion camps, and, impossibly, love.
Camp Damascus and the God-fearing community that runs it pride themselves on being the most effective gay conversion camp in the country. If traditional conversion therapy isn’t frightening enough, just add real monsters, demons, and the powers of Hell.
Tingle creates a terrifying world that will resonate with anyone who has ever been punished for being themselves.
Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror
This stunning anthology includes sixteen new stories by visionary queer writers, each a feverish blend of ecstasy, heartache, horror, and suffering.
Within these tales, young lovers navigate a labyrinthine garden, a sentient hotel porter confronts a haunting time loop, and a soldier and his abusive commander flee trench warfare only to encounter a darker nightmare. Time-space parasites pursue eternal togetherness, while a graduate student with violent impulses encounters a walking corpse in an unsettling dance.
The impressive table of contents includes stories from Cassandra Khaw, Joe Koch, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Robbie Banfitch, August Clarke, Son M., Jonathan Louis Duckworth, M.V. Pine, Ed Kurtz, LC Von Hessen, Matteo L. Cerilli, November Rush, Meredith Rose, Charlene Adhiambo, Violet, and Thomas Kearnes.
My Darling Dreadful Thing: A Novel
Rife with mystery, lust, and, of course, ghosts, My Darling Dreadful Thing is the perfect read for anyone looking to escape into a world of haunted mansions, murder, and sapphic love.
Roos Beckman and her spirit companion, Ruth, have a history of hysterics. When Roos meets Agnes Knoop at a seance, the two form an instant connection.
The wealthy widow brings Roos into a world filled with intrigue, deception, and danger beyond the veil that Roos may not be prepared to face—and murder accusations she may not be able to refute.
Your Body is Not Your Body
Your Body is Not Your Body is a collection of stories about alien body modification, demonic pregnant monks, psychedelic space orgies and the corpse of God, and a trans teen’s destruction of bigots through grotesque body horror.
Just about anything you can think of, this anthology features. Though self-proclaimed “weird horror,” Your Body is Not Your Body is not weird just for the sake of being weird, these authors write about life-and-gender-affirming care, powerful transgender and nonbinary characters, and, most importantly, give trans teens and other readers the knowledge that weird is powerful, even (or especially) space cathedral, centaur, pregnant medieval monks weird.
It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
This collection of essays on 25 of the most-loved horror films explores the historical relationship between queerness and the horror genre.
Horror as a genre has been inherently misogynist, anti-trans, and homophobic in the past, but the authors of these essays take a deeper look at the ways in which horror and queerness intertwine in knots both empowering and oppressive.
It Came from the Closet draws on popular horror movie tropes and draws connections to the queer and feminist identities with a collection of diverse voices from writers of various genres and backgrounds.
Your Mind is a Terrible Thing
Pack your spacesuit, because Your Mind is a Terrible Thing takes you aboard a starship on a journey through outer space. Did we mention it’s haunted?
The crew of the M.G. Yellowjacket is at the mercy of a mysterious mind-controlling entity that has infiltrated the vessel, unless Alto, the communications specialist, can make it past the creature and reach the crew to send for help.
Hailey Piper combines space, monsters, and psychological horror in one captivating story of unlikely bravery and truly disturbing cosmic horror, just how we like it.
Everything the Darkness Eats
There’s nothing quite like a quaint, idyllic New England town and the tight-knit communities that inhabit them. Unless, of course, that town is not as idyllic as its exterior, and the community is much more sinister than it appears.
In Eric LaRocca’s Everything the Darkness Eats, the town of Henley’s Edge and its inhabitants are threatened by bizarre occurrences linked to dark magic, deep-seated hatred and gruesome violence, and the town is rocked by the grief that haunts all those left behind.
Mystery, magic, and tragedy are woven in a captivating web throughout this eerie read.
Flowers for the Sea
Flowers for the Sea is the story of an ostracized commoner trapped on an ark with the survivors of a devastating flood that decimated her kingdom.
Iraxi is left surrounded by the bloodthirsty monsters in the sea, and the beasts of human nature among the survivors squabbling over limited resources aboard the ark. Iraxi herself is pregnant, and with what, she cannot be sure.
Zin E. Rocklyn’s gothic fantasy is rife with monsters, dark powers, and the insistence of the not-quite-human life that grows inside Iraxi to survive despite the horrors facing both mother and child as Iraxi faces her fate.
