Blacker than Black


Rhi Etzweiler - 2012
    We’ve been Nightwalkers in the blue-light district since the vamps took over the world. Don’t know how many years it’s been. Long enough that a stream of fellow ’walkers have come and gone. Most don’t last long selling their chi. End up face-down in the gutter, or worse.For us, one night and one sale change everything.Monsieur Garthelle is the first john to hunt me down. He calls me a chi thief in one breath and offers absolution—servitude—in the next. Maybe I’m a sucker, but I like living and breathing. Strange that such a powerful vamp would show leniency to a mere human. And something’s not right with the chi I took from him. It won’t go away.Neither will he, and he’s forcing us to spy on his peers. Then a vamp turns up dead, and we go from playing eyes and ears to investigating a murder. This isn’t what I signed up for. All I ever wanted was to sell a little chi, maybe steal some in return. I should’ve kept my damn hands to myself.This is my story. Look through my eyes.

Orphan Number Eight


Kim van Alkemade - 2015
    When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother Sam and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans. But when she turns fifteen, she runs away to Colorado hoping to find the brother she lost and discovers a family she never knew she had.Though Rachel believes she’s shut out her painful childhood memories, years later she is confronted with her dark past when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrews Home and her patient is none other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Solomon. Rachel becomes obsessed with making Dr. Solomon acknowledge, and pay for, her wrongdoing. But each passing hour Rachel spends with the old doctor reveal to Rachel the complexities of her own nature. She realizes that a person’s fate—to be one who inflicts harm or one who heals—is not always set in stone.Lush in historical detail, rich in atmosphere and based on true events, Orphan #8 is a powerful, affecting novel of the unexpected choices we are compelled to make that can shape our destinies.

Gossip


Christopher Bram - 1997
    The manager of a Greenwich Village bookstore and politically to the left, Ralph agrees to an F2F (face-to-face) meeting with Thersites in Washington, D.C., where his friend Nancy writes speeches for a popular woman senator. With his penchant for Shakespearean drama, Ralph should have seen the elements gathering for tragedy...or farce. Thersites proves to be a young, attractive, and enthusiastic lover. He is also Republican, in the closet, right-wing, and the author of a tell-all book that spreads gossip about several Washington women, including a footnote about a lesbian affair between a speechwriter and a "happily married" senator. In a town where rumors can kill a career, such words may be fatal. And despite his passion, Ralph is disturbed by his new lover's politics...and then stunned at being charged with his murder. Christopher Bram joins dark satire with chilling suspense as Ralph is arrested for first-degree homicide and becomes a "cause" in the gay community.

Manhunt


Gretchen Felker-Martin - 2022
    Y: The Last Man meets The Girl With All the Gifts in Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt, an explosive post-apocalyptic novel that follows trans women and men on a grotesque journey of survival.Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they'll never face the same fate.Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren't safe.After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics―all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.Manhunt is a timely, powerful response to every gender-based apocalypse story that failed to consider the existence of transgender and non-binary people, from a powerful new voice in horror.

Lord John and the Private Matter


Diana Gabaldon - 2003
    Now one of these characters, Major Lord John Grey, opens the door to his own part of this world — eighteenth-century London, a seething anthill of nobility and rabble peopled by soldiers and spies, whores and dukes. Great Britain is battling France for supremacy on three continents — and life is good for a soldier.The year is 1757. On a clear morning in mid-June, Lord John Grey emerges from London’s Beefsteak Club, his mind in turmoil. A nobleman and a high-ranking officer in His Majesty’s Army, Grey has just witnessed something shocking. But his efforts to avoid a scandal that might destroy his family are interrupted by something still more urgent: the Crown appoints him to investigate the brutal murder of a comrade in arms, who may have been a traitor.Obliged to pursue two inquiries at once, Major Grey finds himself ensnared in a web of treachery and betrayal that touches every stratum of English society — and threatens all he holds dear. From the bawdy houses of London’s night-world to the stately drawing rooms of the nobility, and from the blood of a murdered corpse to the thundering seas ruled by the majestic fleet of the East India Company, Lord John pursues the elusive trails of a vanishing footman and a woman in green velvet, who may hold the key to everything — or nothing.The early days of the Seven Years War come brilliantly to life in this historical mystery by an author whose unique and compelling storytelling has engrossed millions of readers worldwide.

Camp Carnage


Joshua Winning - 2014
    The remote Camp Genesis offers desperate parents a place to "straighten" out their gay teenagers with the help of the puritanical Katherine Creevey.Besides the typical horsing around, campfire tales and summer games, the Genesis program forces gay and questioning teens into humiliating gender-based lessons. While Billy wants nothing more than to escape Camp Genesis, he can't help worrying that something even more sinister is hiding just out of sight.Unknown to Billy, two campers were murdered three years ago. Just days after Billy and the new campers arrive, people start to go missing, and it's up to Billy and his new friend Jem to find out what's really going on. Is a maniac on the loose? Is history repeating itself? One thing's for sure - at Camp Genesis, you have to fight to survive...

The Boy Who Could See Demons


Carolyn Jess-Cooke - 2012
    His best friend is a 9000-year-old demon called Ruen. When his depressive mother attempts suicide yet again, Alex meets child psychiatrist Anya. Still bearing the scars of her own daughter's battle with schizophrenia, Anya fears for Alex's mental health and attempts to convince him that Ruen doesn't exist. But as she runs out of medical proof for many of Alex's claims, she is faced with a question: does Alex suffer from schizophrenia, or can he really see demons?

Tell Me I’m Worthless


Alison Rumfitt - 2021
    Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe. Those same arteries tangle you up and night and make it hard for you to breathe. But come morning, you thank it for what it has done for you, and you sip from its golden cup, and kiss its perfect feet, and you know that all will be right in this godforsaken world as long as it is there to watch over you.Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends Ila and Hannah. Since then, things have not been going well. Alice is living a haunted existence, selling videos of herself cleaning for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. She hasn’t spoken to Ila since they went into the House. She hasn’t seen Hannah either. Memories of that night torment her mind and her flesh, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, past the KEEP OUT sign, over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, she knows she must go. Together Alice and Ila must face the horrifying occurrences that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, who the House has chosen to make its own. Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.

Blood Divine


Greg Howard - 2016
    But a disconcerting voicemail lures Cooper back home to the coast of South Carolina and to Warfield—the deserted plantation where his darkness first awakened. While searching for his missing grandmother, Cooper uncovers the truth about his ancestry and becomes a pawn in an ancient war between two supernatural races. In order to protect the only man he’s ever loved, Cooper must embrace the dark power threatening to consume him and choose sides in a deadly war between the righteous and the fallen.Category: Fantasy/Paranormal with MM Romantic ElementsSub-Genre: HorrorNumber of words: 88,208

Broken Monsters


Lauren Beukes - 2014
    As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams? If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story. If you're Thomas Keen, known on the street as TK, you'll do what you can to keep your homeless family safe--and find the monster who is possessed by the dream of violently remaking the world. If Lauren Beukes's internationally bestselling The Shining Girls was a time-jumping thrill ride through the past, her Broken Monsters is a genre-redefining thriller about broken cities, broken dreams, and broken people trying to put themselves back together again.

The Living One


Lewis Gannett - 1992
    The invitation to spend some time with his dad - the Baron Malcolm Spoor - comes as a surprise. But what awaits Torrance at his father's windswept estate is far worse than he could ever imagine. Welcome to the world of The Living One, one of the most frightening, clever, and suspenseful novels of the year. In this tour-de-force debut, Lewis Gannett spins a spellbinding story that summons up magic, body thievery, killer dogs, ESP wars, and lusty, genre-defying sex - straight, gay, and forms yet unnamed. The Spoors are the ultimate dysfunctional family. Wealthy, shamelessly extravagant, and impossibly attractive, they are also cursed. The curse has been handed down from father to son for seven hundred years, ever since the Crusades, when a bizarre and mystifying event created a recurring pattern of madness and death. As Baron Malcolm Spoor prepares for his demise, he must pass on the family riches - and its traditions - to his estranged son. But Malcolm and Torrance both have secrets they would rather keep to themselves, secrets that are nearly revealed when a shadowy government scientist picks up psychic readings from the Spoor estate and a bohemian teacher becomes personally involved with Torrance. These two begin an investigation into the extraordinary life of Baron Malcolm Spoor, and their findings are truly horrifying. Updating elements of the epistolary novel popularized in Dracula, Lewis Gannett tells his gothic story through the inventive use of videotape transcripts, diary entries, and historical records. Vivid, scary, mythic, and engrossing, The Living One explores the terrifying dimensions of family guilt, aging, and the murderous tensions between fathers and sons. Lewis Gannett has written a startling and thrilling novel that marks the debut of an original new voice in fiction.

The Blade Between


Sam J. Miller - 2020
    Miller comes a frightening and uncanny ghost story about a rapidly changing city in upstate New York and the mysterious forces that threaten it.Ronan Szepessy promised himself he’d never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City’s distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge. Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom’s wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become—overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable. Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real estate developers aren’t the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan’s hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.

Kept Boy


Robert Rodi - 1996
    Which, in his characters' vernacular, means he's a total scream.Having made a career of deconstructing the denizens of the modern gay world, Robert Rodi now turns his hand to -- and twists the knife in -- yet another gay archetype: the kept boy.Dennis Racine is 31, but looks 23...which might be considered his good fortune, except that even 23 is a bit old for his chosen profession: pampered "companion" to the fiftyish, filthy rich Chicago theatrical impresario Farleigh Nock (a.k.a. "the Papp of the Provinces"). In fact, Farleigh has lately become so resistant to Dennis's charms that he's conferred the ultimate indignity on him: demanding that he get a job.Dennis proves himself astonishingly unemployable, then learns that his old job is in peril as well; for Farleigh's affections have been snared by the lithe young pool boy Jasper Moran. When Jasper is promoted from chlorination duties to directing Farleigh's production of Lady Windermere's Fan, Dennis knows he's in danger of losing his place in Farleigh's life (not to mention his Last Will and Testament).Lending him a hand in a spirit of common cause are his two best friends. Lonnie Roach is the kept boy of an ancient gossip columnist; Paulette Ng is retained by a member of Congress whose anonymity she protects by referring to him only as "the Spanker of the House".Together they devise a plan to whisk Farleigh away from Jaspers influence, landing him in Greece, where Dennis can re-seduce him in exotic privacy. The scheme provokes bigger repercussions than Dennis ever expected and he finds himself fighting for his man -- and his man's legacy-- more fiercely than ever before, aided only by two Iowa co-eds and a maniacal Santorini grandmother.His satiric eye sharper than ever, but never straying from the deep humanity that makes his characters and stories so appealing, Robert Rodi once again delivers a fabulous, unforgettable farce of the kind that has made him so enduringly popular.

The Sluts


Dennis Cooper - 2004
    Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.

Winter


Josh Lanyon - 2013
    Still grieving over the sudden death of his lover, antiques dealer Flynn Ambrose moves to the old, ramshackle house on Pitch Pine Lane to catalog and sell the large inventory of arcane and oddball items that once filled his late uncle's mysterious museum.But not all the items are that easy to catalog -- or get rid of.