Skip to main content

Featured

The Graceview Patient by Caitlin Starling

Margaret lives with a rare autoimmune condition that has destroyed her life, leaving her isolated. It has no cure, but she’s making do as best she can—until she’s offered a fully paid-for spot in an experimental medical trial at Graceview Memorial. The conditions are simple, if grueling: she will live at the hospital as a full-time patient, subjecting herself to the near-total destruction of her immune system and its subsequent regeneration. The trial will essentially kill most of, but not all of her. But as the treatment progresses and her body begins to fail, she stumbles upon something sinister living and spreading within the hospital. Unsure of what's real and what is just medication-induced delusion, Margaret struggles to find a way out as her body and mind succumb further to the darkness lurking throughout Graceview's halls. PUBLISHER: St. Martin's Press YEAR: 2025 LENGTH: 320 pages AGE: Adult GENRE: Horror RECOMMENDED: Highly Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep. *I...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

Glorious Fiends by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

When infamous hot mess vampire Roxanne resurrects her deceased best friends, she's confronted by a dream-dwelling Guardian of the Underworld, who demands that she replace them in his afterlife with three equally nefarious creatures—or he'll drag her there instead. 

Reunited with Medusa and Mx. Hyde, Roxanne and her macabre girl gang must become monster hunters themselves and fight for the future of their friendship. 

Gory, sexy, silly, touching—Glorious Fiends asks who the real monsters are, and if the bonds that we think are solely human are really ours alone. This Hammer-inspired odyssey is a nostalgic trip through '80s horror tropes—with modern sensibilities. 

TITLE: Glorious Fiends
AUTHOR: Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
PUBLISHER: Underland Press
YEAR: 2022
LENGTH: 140 pages 
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Horror
RECOMMENDED: Yes

Queer Rep Summary: Lesbian/Sapphic Main Character(s), Bi/Pan Main Character(s), Genderqueer/Nonbinary Secondary Character(s).

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

GLORIOUS FIENDS is a fever dream of a book, with intense friendships between utterly relatable monsters tasked with dooming their fellow creatures for their own survival, lest they be forever tormented in their nightmares.

It explores friendship, the tension between old friends and new relationships, and outgrowing each other without hard feeling. The short format brings a frenetic energy to these themes, with each scene lasting precisely long enough to create intense emotional arcs in very few pages. 

Characterization is definitely much more prominent than worldbuilding in this. Everyone's powers seem to be what would make sense for their kind of monster but also be kind of inconvenient for how this all works. I didn't recognize all the references because I'm not a horror buff, but based on what I did catch I think most of the monsters are based on classic horror, usually with some genderbending involved (explicitly so for Mx. Hyde). My favorite is Medusa, with a use for her snakes that I haven't run into before and which definitely surprised me. 

Check this out if you'd like some sexy horror which doesn't shy away from the gloriously weird.

CW for sexual content (explicit), sexism (brief), drug use, alcohol, excrement (brief mention), vomit, blood (graphic), gore, violence, body horror, torture, self harm, cannibalism, murder, death (graphic).

Bookshop Affiliate Buy Link

Add this on TheStoryGraph

A macabre cartoon flower with purple lips, sharp teeth, and a massive tongue licking the lips suggestively


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment