My Pride TBR : 12 Queer Books I’m reading this Pride Season
June is back in action and while I have a love hate relationship with June as someone who would starts melting if it’s above 75 degrees, I do love Pride. This year’s Pride feels especially important as a queer person as we see the true colors of the world around us.
I’m not here to get political, there are plenty of people much smarter than I am talking about the state of queer rights globally, and I am just an English major with too much anxiety and too many opinions. But I am here to embrace the spirit of Pride. Pride was a riot. Pride was filled with joy, love, and art as an act of true resistance. Pride was not created by corporations, and yes, I am incredibly offended by the sapphic target birds and the U-Haul. So let’s embrace some queer art and joy with our reading this Pride month.
Here is a list of what I’ll be picking up this month as I make my way through new releases, books that have been on my TBR for years, and new to me authors. If you’re into queer horror, fantasy, or cozy romance, this list might be for you.
This is one of my most anticipated releases on 2025. Weird sapphic mall horror? Sign me right up.
Eat the Ones you love by Sarah Maria Griffin
A twisted, tangled story about first love and identity–and plants with a taste for human flesh
During a grocery run to her local shopping center, Michelle “Shelly” Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window, and decides that she can be exactly the help the florist needs. She’s recently left her fiancé, and lost her job, and moved home to her parents’ house during the strange, dull thick of the pandemic – she needs something good. Flowers are good, she decides, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help.
However, an orchid growing nearby is watching her, closely. His name is Baby, and Neve, who runs the little flower shop belongs to him. He’s young, he’s hungry, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats – nobody, he eats – can satisfy the thing he most desires. Neve. She who has tended to him since he was a seedling. Or, something resembling a seedling, at least. He adores her, and wants to consume her – and he thinks Shelly can help him.
This is a story about possession, and monstrosity, and why we want to eat the ones we love. It is about things that grow, like hunger, and desire, which sometimes can feel a lot like the very same thing.
Trang Thanh Tran is an all time favorite horror author of mine after her debut novel She is a Haunting blew me away. I knew I immediately had to pick this up as her character work and descriptions are a masterpiece.
They bloom at night by Trang Thanh Tran
A red algae bloom has taken over Mercy, Louisiana. Ever since a devastating hurricane, mutated wildlife lurks in the water that rises by the day. But Mercy has always been a place where monsters walk in plain sight. Especially at its heart: The Cove, where Noon’s life was upended long before the storm at a party her older boyfriend insisted on.
Now, Noon is stuck navigating the submerged town with her mom, who believes their dead family has reincarnated as sea creatures. Alone with the pain of what happened that night at the cove, Noon buries the truth: she is not the right shape.
When Mercy’s predatory leader demands Noon and her mom capture the creature drowning residents, she reluctantly finds an ally in his deadly hunter of a daughter and friends old and new. As the next storm approaches, Noon must confront the past and decide if it’s time to answer the monster itching at her skin.
V.E. Schwab is who I aspire to be at this point in my life, and while not every one of her books is a hit for me (sorry I didn’t like the Shades of Magic series) her one off books tend to shatter me to the point I can’t put myself back together.
Bury our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
From the bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue comes a spellbinding queer love story following the desires and dreams of a trio of enigmatic young women.
Santo Domingo de la Calzada, 1532. London, 1837. Boston, 2019.
Three young women, their bodies planted in the same soil, their stories tangling like roots.
One grows high, and one grows deep, and one grows wild.
And all of them grow teeth.
I have been looking at this book since it came out and I am just a sucker for anything compared to Mexican Gothic and Frankenstein, but if I don’t like it, it will be devastating. Big names come big expectations.
A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock
Mexican Gothic meets The Lie Tree by way of Oscar Wilde and Mary Shelley in this delightfully witty horror debut.
A captivating tale of two Victorian gentlemen hiding their relationship away in a botanical garden who embark on a Frankenstein-style experiment with unexpected consequences.
It is an unusual thing, to live in a botanical garden. But Simon and Gregor are an unusual pair of gentlemen. Hidden away in their glass sanctuary from the disapproving tattle of Victorian London, they are free to follow their own interests without interference. For Simon, this means long hours in the dark basement workshop, working his taxidermical art. Gregor’s business is exotic plants – lucrative, but harmless enough. Until his latest acquisition, a strange fungus which shows signs of intellect beyond any plant he’s seen, inspires him to attempt a true intelligent life from plant matter.
Driven by the glory he’ll earn from the Royal Horticultural Society for such an achievement, Gregor ignores the flaws in his that intelligence cannot be controlled; that plants cannot be reasoned with; and that the only way his plant-beast will flourish is if he uses a recently deceased corpse for the substrate.
The experiment – or Chloe, as she is named – outstrips even Gregor’s expectations, entangling their strange household. But as Gregor’s experiment flourishes, he wilts under the cost of keeping it hidden from jealous eyes. The mycelium grows apace in this sultry greenhouse. But who is cultivating whom?
Told with wit and warmth, this is an extraordinary tale of family, fungus and more than a dash of bloody revenge from an exciting new voice in queer horror.
I have been following this author since before she published this book and I’ve been hooked from the start. I had always meant to order it, but Amazon and I have been fighting for years (from an ethical standpoint but also, why does a town 10 minutes away from me get 2 day shipping and I get 5-7 day shipping?) so when I saw it available on the Queer Liberation Library, I immediately grabbed it.
Fifty Feet Down by Sophie Tanen
In the years since its foundation, the town of West Rutland has been known for one thing only: marble.
Marble houses, marble art, marble people. They were first and foremost a marble town, historically mining from deep, hundred feet quarries scattered in the woods. Production stopped long ago, though, when thirteen workers were killed in an accident in the 1900s, a taint of death lingering over the heart and soul of the town.
Today, it becomes known for something else, something darker. Four disappearances in the past month, all high school boys yet to be found. That’s all Alex knows when her boss ships her from New York City to Vermont to get the story. That, and the only family member she has left is waiting there, unaware of her existence.
But instead of answers, she only finds more questions in the form of Luna, who, despite working at the local sculpture garden, avoids the topic of marble quarries like the plague, mourning a ghost that no one in town will speak a word about.
The last thing Alex wants is a distraction, but that’s all Luna needs, and together they unravel each other’s secrets one by one, searching for ways in which they might be intertwined. And through it all the quarries wait, where Alex finds Luna on more than one occasion, crumpled on her knees at the edge, staring down into fifty feet of haunted water.
Gothic dark academia/cottagecore horror vibes? What else can I say.
Don’t le the Forest in by C.G. Drews
Once upon a time, Andrew had cut out his heart and given it to this boy, and he was very sure Thomas had no idea that Andrew would do anything for him. Protect him. Lie for him.Kill for him.
High school senior Andrew Perrault finds refuge in the twisted fairytales that he writes for the only person who can ground him to reality—Thomas Rye, the boy with perpetually ink-stained hands and hair like autumn leaves. And with his twin sister, Dove, inexplicably keeping him at a cold distance upon their return to Wickwood Academy, Andrew finds himself leaning on his friend even more.
But something strange is going on with Thomas. His abusive parents have mysteriously vanished, and he arrives at school with blood on his sleeve. Thomas won’t say a word about it, and shuts down whenever Andrew tries to ask him questions. Stranger still, Thomas is haunted by something, and he seems to have lost interest in his artwork—whimsically macabre sketches of the monsters from Andrew’s wicked stories.
Desperate to figure out what’s wrong with his friend, Andrew follows Thomas into the off-limits forest one night and catches him fighting a nightmarish monster—Thomas’s drawings have come to life and are killing anyone close to him. To make sure no one else dies, the boys battle the monsters every night. But as their obsession with each other grows stronger, so do the monsters, and Andrew begins to fear that the only way to stop the creatures might be to destroy their creator…
This is completely a peer pressure read. I never thought I would pick it up, but so many horror creators I love have adored this, so we’ll see.
Someone you can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell
Discover this creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster—by Nebula Award-winning debut author John Wiswell
Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she’s fallen in love.
Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.
However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.
Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?
Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.
And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.
Not all of these authors are queer, but I love some diverse horror so I am counting this on the list
Other Terrors: an inclusive anthology edited by Rena Mason and Vince A. Liaguno
Be they of a different culture, a different background, a different sexual orientation or gender identity, a different belief system, or a different skin color, some people simply aren’t part of the community’s majority—and are perceived as scary. Humans are almost instinctively inclined to fear what’s different, and there are a multitude of individuals who have spent far too long on the outside looking in. And the thing about the outside is . . . it’s much larger than you think.
In Other Terrors, horror writers from a multitude of underrepresented backgrounds have created stories of everyday people, places, and things where something shifts, striking a deeper, much more primal, chord of fear. Are our eyes playing tricks on us, or is there something truly sinister lurking under the surface of what we thought we knew? And who among us is really the other, after all?
Contributors include: Tananarive Due, Jennifer McMahon, S.A. Cosby, Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu, Michael Thomas Ford, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Christina Sng, Denise Dumars, Usman T. Malik, Annie Neugebauer, Gabino Iglesias, Hailey Piper, Nathan Carson, Shanna Heath, Tracy Cross, Linda D. Addison, Maxwell I. Gold, Larissa Glasser, Eugen Bacon, Holly Lyn Walrath, Jonathan Lees, M. E. Bronstein, Michael Hanson
Pallete cleanser supreme. I’ve been holding onto this series for when I truly become horror-ed out, and I think June might be the month. Cozy runaway sapphic tea/bookshop owners? Nothing could counteract a spine wrenching horror like that could.
Can’t Spell Treason without Tea by Rebecca Thorne
All Reyna and Kianthe want is to open a bookshop that serves tea. Worn wooden floors, plants on every table, firelight drifting between the rafters… all complemented by love and good company. Thing is, Reyna works as one of the Queen’s private guards, and Kianthe is the most powerful mage in existence. Leaving their lives isn’t so easy.
But after an assassin takes Reyna hostage, she decides she’s thoroughly done risking her life for a self-centered queen. Meanwhile, Kianthe has been waiting for a chance to flee responsibility–all the better that her girlfriend is on board. Together, they settle in Tawney, a town nestled in the icy tundra of dragon country, and open the shop of their dreams.
What follows is a cozy tale of mishaps, mysteries, and a murderous queen throwing the realm’s biggest temper tantrum. In a story brimming with hurt/comfort and quiet fireside conversations, these two women will discover just what they mean to each other… and the world.
Kalynn Baryon is a queer author I have been meaning to pick up for years, what is wrong with me? How have I not read her yet? Now that this is out, I have no more excuses. HOLD ME ACCOUNTABLE!
You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Baryon
At Camp Mirror Lake, terror is the name of the game . . . but can you survive the night?
This heart-pounding slasher by New York Times bestselling author Kalynn Bayron is perfect for fans of Fear Street.
Charity Curtis has the summer job of her dreams, playing the “final girl” at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film,
Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business.
But the last weekend of the season, Charity’s co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity’s role as the final girl suddenly becomes all too real. If Charity and her girlfriend Bezi hope to survive the night, they’ll need figure out what this killer is after. Is there is more to the story of Mirror Lake and its dangerous past than Charity ever suspected?
Another pallete cleanser I’ve been saving on the back burner for years. Sometimes you just need a smooshy queer YA romance to fix all of your problems.
Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee
Felix Ever After meets Becky Albertalli in this swoon-worthy, heartfelt rom-com about how a transgender teen’s first love challenges his ideas about perfect relationships.
Noah Ramirez thinks he’s an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem–all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.
When a troll exposes the blog as fiction, Noah’s world unravels. The only way to save the Diary is to convince everyone that the stories are true, but he doesn’t have any proof. Then Drew walks into Noah’s life, and the pieces fall into place: Drew is willing to fake-date Noah to save the Diary. But when Noah’s feelings grow beyond their staged romance, he realizes that dating in real life isn’t quite the same as finding love on the page.
In this charming novel by Emery Lee, Noah will have to choose between following his own rules for love or discovering that the most romantic endings are the ones that go off script.
This is my only planned non fiction for this month, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a true artist and The Future is Disabled was a life changing read for me. It is only right that I continue on with her work in honor of Pride.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.