Many of my friends have been singing the praises of British romance author K. J. Charles for some time now, but I’ve only just hopped on that bandwagon. K. J. Charles currently has over two dozen books to her name, ranging from straight up historical romance to series more tinged with horror and fantasy, most with queer love stories. I decided (or rather, the Romancing the Gothic book club decided) to start with one of her more fantastical works: Spectred Isle, Book One in the Green Men series, which came out in 2017. Continue reading Review of Spectred Isle—A Romance of Green Men
Tag: LGBT
Review of Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology
The Gothic has always been a place where marginalized gender expressions and sexualities could be explored—though in the past, this was often either done through deeply buried subtext or in a way that punished transgression and reasserted the prevailing societal norms. Today, however, queer Gothic is one of the most lively and prolific areas of the genre, and many authors are writing stories where queer identities are overt, accepted, and even celebrated. Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology, edited by Celine Frohn, collects a whole set of stories that do just that. The anthology came out back in February from Nyx Publishing after raising money through a successful Kickstarter campaign. Continue reading Review of Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology
Denizens of Distant Realms Review
Once upon a time doesn’t necessarily have to be long, long ago. I’ve mentioned my great love of fairy tales—whether they be classics, retellings, or brand-new fairy tales that emulate the classics in form and style. Denizens of Distant Realms, a new collection of short stories by Dawn Vogel, falls into the latter category. The book came out back in August, and while I was previously unfamiliar with the author and her other works, my great love of fairy tales drew me to take a chance on the new collection. Continue reading Denizens of Distant Realms Review
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue Review
Ah, the Grand Tour of Europe—that most exciting part of coming of age for any young Victorian gentleman. Monty’s Grand Tour, however, gets a bit too exciting in The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee—a queer YA historical novel that my friends have been ranting and raving to me about for well over a year. Apparently, July is the month for me to finally catch up on all the great reads from the last few years that I somehow missed. I actually met Mackenzi Lee back in 2015 at the Brooklyn Book Festival and reviewed her debut novel, This Monstrous Thing. And yet I still managed to be the last one to hop on the Gentleman’s Guide bandwagon. Oh well, better late than never! Continue reading The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue Review
Down Among the Sticks and Bones–A Gothic Tale of Twins
If you discovered a door to another world, would you go through it? What if it gave you the opportunity to change who you are, to escape the pressures of who you’re expected to be? Twelve-year-old twins Jack and Jill face these questions in Seanan McGuire’s Down Among the Sticks and Bones. This book, which came out back in June, is the second book in McGuire’s Wayward Children series. (You can read my review of the first book here.) Rather than being a sequel to Every Heart a Doorway, however, Down Among the Sticks and Bones is more of a prequel that can also be read entirely as a stand-alone. Ostensibly a fantasy story about discovering a dark world full of monsters, the book is really a deep dive into questions of identity and family relationships. Continue reading Down Among the Sticks and Bones–A Gothic Tale of Twins
The Gay and Bisexual Men of Gothic Fiction
As Pride Month draws to a close, I wanted to write a post highlighting a few of the queer writers in the Gothic canon. Gothic literature has been closely associated with taboo sexuality since its inception, and we can see this legacy clearly today in the queerness of modern horror (and in the unexpected adoption of the Babadook as the unofficial mascot of Pride this year). Not all of the LGBTQ representation in Gothic fiction has been particularly positive, as these works often play to society’s anxieties around sexual taboo. But the Gothic was also a place where many queer writers found a home. As is often the case with historical figures, it can be difficult to speak with certainty about the sexualities of authors long dead, especially since most of them lived during a time when “sodomy” was punishable by exile, arrest, and even death. Almost every writer of early Gothic fiction has been accused by enemies or claimed by critics to be part of the LGBTQ community, with varying amounts of evidence. In this post, I will highlight three of the most notorious gay or bisexual writers whose personal and romantic lives have contributed to their fame almost as much as their works have. Continue reading The Gay and Bisexual Men of Gothic Fiction