ladybusiness | Guest Post! Feminist & Queer Horror Recs

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"Feminist & Queer Horror Recs | Lady Business Cross-Post! [CC]" (Watch on YouTube)

Hey, Booktube! Chelsea, TheReadingOutlaw here to do a video that I have been meaning to do for you guys for forever.

First of all, can we take a moment to appreciate the evolution of the setup here? We always love a good rainbow bookshelf. I finally hung my skull wreath that is also in all the bright rainbow colors. This corner of my office just makes me so flipping happy, you guys. Which is, I guess, a little ironically keeping in spirit with the theme of today's video. This video is also going to be cross-posted to Lady Business. They are doing their Halloween week a little earlier than actual American Halloween but that's super great because it's October! It's spooky month. I think the whole month should be Halloween month. It basically is, who're we kidding? So I have been meaning to do this video on my channel for a very long time, and this seemed like the absolute perfect opportunity to do so!

I'm here today to talk about horror books that are queer and female/femme friendly. One of the things that I hear the most from people who want to read more horror is that they like horror, but they really don't want to read books where people's consent is violated, where violence against the female body is the norm or like a plot hinge that is frequently used. Because here's the thing, guys—that happens a lot in horror, thrillers, that kind of thing. So I'm here today to give you guys some titles and some recommendations for books in which that is not the case, in which female agency is respected and which queer identity and queer bodies are respected. In which all of the things that we normally love to see in all of the rest of our fiction still happen—but they're scary! Which is personally what I want most from horror.

To start off this list, I feel like it always behooves us to kind of go back to the "beginning", or at least some of the most foundational texts in whatever subject area that we're looking at. In this case, the first one I want to talk about is Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite. Poppy is a trans man who lives under the identity of Billy Martin but continues to publish under his pseudonym of Poppy Z. Brite. This is a queer twist on a classic haunted house story in which Trevor, whose father went insane and killed his entire family—leaving only Trevor alive—returns to the house in which this tragedy happened to see if that jogs any kind of memory or reason why this has happened. And while there he meets Zach, who is a bisexual computer programmer on the run from the law, stumbling into this house that's a little bit out in the middle of nowhere looking for a place to crash. And lo and behold, Trevor and Zach meet and the intersection of the storylines of the development of their relationship, coupled with these two very thrilling storylines of Zach being hunted by the FBI and also what the hell is going on with this haunted house, really intertwined and mesh and overlap in a way that is really satisfying to get to the end of as a reader. Poppy Z. Brite has written a lot of horror books with queer content. They are one of the central pillar authors to queer horror. If you search for the genre you will find Poppy Z. Brite's name. This just happens to be one of my favorites and also happens to be one of the earliest in their publication. So that's Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite.

Next up I want to talk about another foundational texts in the queer and female/femme-friendly horror canon, which is Affinity by Sarah Waters. Affinity by Sarah Waters is not as queer as Fingersmith, but more queer than some of the other Sarah Waters books that exist. In Affinity, we watch as a Victorian woman who has survived her attempts at death by suicide goes to begin to kind of try and find meaning in her life by visiting some of the inmates at a local asylum, where she meets another woman who is there being held as a mystic, basically, as a witch. And the intertwining of whether or not this woman is actually a mystic, like she claims, along with the very forbidden romance of Victorian London and this jailed setting that keeps them physically apart as they grow more emotionally close, is very, very interesting. If your horror stuff goes more like room-temperature, than keep it in the freezer, which I should probably say, is a rating scale that I got from the Books in the Freezer podcast, which I will link to below. I was a guest for their episode on queer horror, where we talk even more about queer friendly titles, but it's also just a really great podcast. If you like horror fiction, they use basically a rating system of room temperature, keep it in the refrigerator, and keep it in the freezer—which is a reference to the Friends episode, where Rachel is reading The Shining and it's so terrifying that she has to keep it in the freezer. But if you like your horror a little bit more on the room temperature side, then this is definitely one that I would suggest checking out. I think it falls more in the psychological thriller/light light horror category, but still. It really pulls along at what I think is a really great pace but it's still very much so a book that operates in a deep sense of foreboding, which can go really nicely along with the colder weather this time of year.

Then I want to go ahead and talk about some short stories. Short stories are a publication style that are really popular in lots of genres, but are specifically very popular in horror. There's a tradition of horror operating in a short, suspenseful driven format, sometimes even better than they do over the course of a longer novel. So I want to go ahead and recommend Ghost Summer by Tananarive Due. This is a collection of ghost stories set primarily in the American South. I know that for some of you that might be a little bit of a turnoff, but Tananarive does a really, really great job as a black horror writer of intertwining these ideas of oppression, slavery, bodily autonomy, the violation of all of those things, and the deep horrors and roots and legacies that go down into almost the fabric of the earth on which those things happen. And the ways that they continue to interact with current modern occurrences. This is another book, Tananarive is another name that if you search for horror, especially more like inclusive female/femme friendly horror, this is a name that will pop up. I do think that it's important to understand that because Tananarive sets most of her work largely in the South, there are some times in which violence against women or violence against the queer body can occur, but it is never in a way that is gratuitous.

Next up we have a couple of more recently published titles. The first one is a YA book. This is Daughters Unto Devils by Amy Lukavics. I just want to talk about YA in general for a second—Amy Lukavics, Dawn Kurtagich, these are names of people who are publishing truly horrifying and transcendent books within the genre. I think that we can discount young adult frequently, for many reasons, across many genres—but specifically in horror as thinking that they won't be as frightening, or that because they're written for younger and younger readers, that they are somehow going to be more sanitized or not as horrifying or not as whatever the thing is that we're thinking teenagers kind of "can't handle". Whereas this book—Daughters Unto Devils is one of the most horrifying books that I've read in maybe the last five years. It is unsettling. It is creepy. It may have to do with the fact that I do live in Kansas, and there are a lot of areas around here that would still qualify as the prairie. And this book is set in an 18th century prairie setting. It is about a girl who has become pregnant, and whose family has to basically leave the mountain because winter is coming and they don't have enough provisions. On the way down, they find a town that is abandoned—never a good sign! Never a good sign to find a ghost town! But they've decided to stay, and soon she's seeing things like blood on the wall. She's hearing things like baby cries from the woods. Things are devolving. Her father is slowly going more and more manic, and he's becoming more and more insistent on staying in this house even as things begin to turn for the worse for them and their family. And it's just so really, really - this book freaked me the fuck out. I'm actually thinking about reading it again because it was really good. I recommend starting with Daughters Unto Devils, if you can handle it, but anything that Amy Lukavics has written—she's written not just young adult stuff, but I really really want to push you to give young adult horror a try. Because as we've seen in a lot of other genres, there's an inclusivity and a push for diversity that is happening first and foremost in the young adult sphere.

I have two more titles. The first one is another short story collection. This is Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. It is worth picking up this collection if for no other reason than you read the first story, which is "The Green Ribbon". Which is based on "The Black Velvet Ribbon" that many of you know from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz. If you don't know I don't really want to spoil it for you. I guess you can Google the "girl with the black ribbon". But essentially, the story of a woman who's born with a velvet green ribbon around her neck that she cannot take off and that she will not allow her husband or her son to touch, quickly becomes not just a horror story and this slow buildup of anticipatory dread, but also a really incisive commentary on bodily autonomy and consent and what we do or don't allow our lovers and our family members to do in terms of our body and our space. And the insistence and the ownership and the righteousness that some people can feel when it comes to claiming that part of the person that they are with. It's a really deep story. Other stories in this collection kind of are hit or miss. Not all of them are horror, not all of them are thriller, or like on the darker side. Some of them are very light. Some of them get a little funny, but really I recommend picking this up if you want to look at what is happening as a current evolution and specifically like Latin American Horror, and also just with the short form of horror fiction as it develops and what potential can be had in taking those classic stories and myths and old wives tales and repurposing them to really be reflective of the current cultural moment.

Then the last book I want to recommend is a historical fiction, because historical horror or historical thriller is something that we just haven't really talked about yet. It's a sub-genre we haven't really hit on so far. This is The Spell Book of Katrina Van Tassel: A Story of Sleepy Hollow by Alyssa Palombo. For those of you who are familiar with the Sleepy Hollow myth or the Johnny Depp movie, Katrina Van Tassel is the school teacher/slash local town debutante who is in love with Ichabod Crane, who plays a really key kind of integral part in figuring out the reason why the Headless Horseman is continuing to attack this town. But this book, as is really interesting to see done with this kind of historical fiction lens, switches the story around and tells it from Katrina's point of view as to why her new lover is there, why her new lover is acting as suspicious as he's acting, and she too comes to realize and have to give attention to the reasons that her family has contributed to this horror that is now wrecking the small town. Because the narrative is flipped, and we are hearing it from the female lens and point of view, it is automatically imbued with far more agency, personality, and perspective that we see in the original Sleepy Hollow myth, but still continues to maintain some of those classic New England, cold-night-horror roots. You know what I'm saying? There's almost a locationary genre of horror that this book really pays homage to in a beautiful way.

So there you have it! There are plenty more titles that you can go and pick up, many by these authors, many if you just search for popular list of feminist and queer horror titles. But I really wanted to highlight these ones specifically, as I think they represent some really interesting things for the sub-genres of horror in which they lie.

So yeah! If you liked this video, and you're watching via Lady Business, please feel free to hop over to my YouTube and follow me, like, subscribe—do all of the YouTube things over there. If you're watching this on my Booktube channel—hi guys! Welcome. You've already done most of those things. If you want to scroll down and leave me a comment, an emoji, just something to let me know that you stopped by, I always really love to see who's watching. Keep in mind that I am currently on a not-so-whisper campaign to get to 3000 subscribers by my 31st birthday in November, so if you're watching and you have not subscribed yet and you would feel kind enough to do so, please hit the button, you know where it is.

Otherwise friends—until next time, have fun reading all the spooky books! Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and we'll see you next time. Bye!

★ Chelsea is a Booktuber and a co-host at Not Now, I'm Reading. You can find her on Twitter at anoutlawlife.

[Ed. note: transcript lightly edited for clarity.]

Guest Post! Feminist & Queer Horror Recs

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