Hailey Piper takes the cursed film novel and twists it through grief, lost media, queer bonds and cosmic horror. This five-star review looks at why This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want makes the act of watching feel unsafe.
Queer Horror
Lost Boys by Dean Cade: Queer Horror Meets the Candy Man Murders
Dean Cade’s Lost Boys, book two of the Summer 1973 trilogy from Slashic Horror Press, rebuilds the Houston Mass Murders from the inside out, following a closeted gas-station teenager through the summer the Candy Man came for the Heights. Our five-star review of a queer horror and true-crime hybrid that remembers the boys history reduced to a body count.
You See It Too by AJ Malachite: A Queer Gamebook Horror Where No One Walks Out Whole
A.J. Malachite’s debut You See It Too turns the choose-your-own-adventure format into a body-horror trap, sending three queer students into a bayou preserve after a will-o’-the-wisp that turns out to have larvae. It is folk horror, eco-horror and Southern Gothic at once, with old money farming the swamp for generations. Four stars for a gamebook that refuses to let you save everyone.
Summer Coven: Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor Defang the Vampire
Summer Coven brings Kat Hillis and Rosiee Thor’s married vampire detectives back to Trident Falls for a second cozy paranormal mystery, this time knotted up with the Celestine Coven and a poisoned pet psychic. In our Dead & Breakfast interview, the pair explain what it costs to make horror’s oldest monster cosy, and where the fear goes when nobody is scared of the vampire any more.
Party of a Lifetime by Henry Corrigan: A Queer Body Horror Novel That Puts the Real Monster in the Driveway
Henry Corrigan’s Party of a Lifetime strands four queer friends in Monotony, a 1950s hell town that reshapes itself around their nightmares and slowly reshapes them too. This is body horror written with a mechanic’s patience, with a narcissistic mother at the centre of it, and it is the best thing Corrigan has written.
In These Gilded Ghostly Hearts by Gwendolyn Kiste: Gatsby’s Ghosts Won’t Let Go
Bram Stoker winner Gwendolyn Kiste delivers a haunting queer horror retelling of The Great Gatsby in In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts, following Daisy Buchanan’s daughter as she confronts her mother’s ghost and the still-grasping fingers of Jay Gatsby. This sapphic Gothic novella explores grief, legacy, and the hunger of a house that feeds on unfulfilled love.
