Queer horror books! By queer authors! YA horror has obviously been around forever, but it’s only really been the last couple years that queer horror has finally gotten its due. We may only have a few to choose from, but the quality level is very high. Not a bad one in the bunch.
The Honeys by Ryan La Sala
Ryan La Sala has this way of imbuing queerness into his stories in such a way that it become integral to the plot without tokenizing the characters. The Honeys truly is queer horror, in that the horror is rooted in how genderfluid Mars’ must navigate his cishet conservative world. Oh, and bees. So many bees. Mars survives his sister trying to kill him, but she doesn’t. To figure out what happened to her, Mars kicks his way into her exclusive summer camp. There he’s tormented by foot soldiers of the patriarchy before being taken in by the Honeys, the group of girls his sister was besties with but who are also not at all what they seem.
Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle
Becca transfers into a hoity-toity prep school in an affluent Bay Area suburb. She is so desperate to make friends that she allows herself to be pulled into the orbit of Mean Girls Marley, Arianna, and Mandy. Turns out they’re werewolves who spend their weekends killing asshole college dudes preying on vulnerable girls. Things get messy when Arianna’s own asshole boyfriend gets killed and the cops start closing in. I often recommend this graphic novel to my teenage library patrons with a simple pitch: “queer werewolves eat patriarchy dudebros.” Works every time.
Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White
Andrew Joseph White takes readers to a post-apocalyptic near future where people are struggling to survive. Years before, a cult unleashed a plague on the world that killed off most human life, and now they want to finish the job. Except they need Benji, a trans boy, to do it. He’s infected with a deadly serum, and his escape into the clutches of a band of rebels threatens not just their sinister plot but Benji’s own life. This was so intense and scary that I had to keep taking breaks to keep from being overwhelmed. Trans horror, man. It is not messing around.
Dead Flip by Sara Farizan
It’s 1987 and Cori, Maz, and Sam are best friends forever. Now it’s 1992 and Sam has been missing and presumed dead for the last 5 years. But when Sam returns and is still a 12 year old kid, he claims he was sucked into an evil pinball machine and dropped out into another dimension. None of the kids are who they were back then, but no one has changed more than Sam. It’s giving me queer Stranger Things vibes.
Book of Dreams by Kevin Craig
And this is our second horror novel on this list where an object sends a teen to The Bad Place. A boy named Gaige is lured into a mysterious shop filled with old books. One book in particular. Once he touches it, the strange bookseller tells him, he’s bound to it. He’s sucked into a terrifying world where he and another boy trapped in the Book of Dreams, Mael, are being hunted by an ancient serial killer. Creepy and disconcerting and wonderfully queer.
Rust in the Root by Justina Ireland
Yes, this is another horror-adjacent YA novel, but it is wickedly creepy. The vibe is somewhere between Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. It’s 1937 and Laura is a new recruit to the Bureau of the Arcane’s Conservation Corps, a group of Black magic-workers sent to repair and contain Blight zones, areas where magic has turned the land rotten. Laura and her team end up in a Blight in Ohio that is more than it appears on the surface, with monsters made of death and the threat of Klan-backed necromancy nipping at their heels. I love it whenever we get queerness in historical fiction; after all, it’s not as if we didn’t exist before the internet.
A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee
The Dalloway School has a long history of death and witchcraft. Last year, Felicity’s girlfriend became its latest victim when she died a terrible death that Felicity may or may not be responsible for. Now Felicity is back and sharing a dorm hall with the new girl, Ellis, a writer who makes the word “eccentric” seem quaint. Creepy things start happening, things that seem to point to Alex making an appearance from the other side. Unless it’s just Felicity losing her mind to guilt. Who or what is haunting Felicity? Will she survive the ordeal of finding out? Victoria Lee’s novel is less straight up horror and more gothic mystery, but I was hooked from start to finish.
Alex Brown is a Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, librarianship, and Black history. Find them on twitter (@QueenOfRats), instagram (@bookjockeyalex), and their blog (bookjockeyalex.com).
