Guest post written by Now, Conjurers author Freddie Kölsch
Freddie Kölsch is a connoisseur and crafter of frightful fiction (with a dash of hope) for teens and former teens. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts with her high school sweetheart-turned-wife, a handful of cats, a houseful of art, and a mind’s eye full of ghosts. Now, Conjurers is her first novel.
A love of writing always—in my experience, anyway—springs from a love of reading, or at least from a love of stories. Smarter people than I have opined, informed, and advocated about and for the importance of representation in media, so I’m not going to rehash their points here except to say that I absolutely agree with them…and to add that I love when I discover quality queer romance in fiction. I love it in a gleeful, ridiculous, rubbing-your-hands-together-like-a-cartoon-villian, meme of Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen, waving at the camera kind of way. Look! There I am! There we are!
I’ve been on this train for decades, and of course being terribly in love with my wife makes me extra gooey and malleable when it comes to the un-heterosexual side of coupledom. With a caveat, though: it has to be interesting. There’s gotta be a little more to it than just a love story.
I’m mostly a genre reader, especially horror and sci-fi, but my favorite LGBT+ couples have popped up in all manner of weird little places across my reading life. They’re not always healthy couples, and they’re definitely not paragons of virtue, but they are pairings that involved me, made me yearn for them to achieve some kind of happiness within their vividly-drawn worlds. And they don’t even necessarily achieve any kind of happiness, honestly. (Spoilers ahoy, by the way.) Here are a few of the queer couples who have kept me company over the years, the ones with a special place of honor in the library I carry around in my head:
1. Meinert and Gnüss, “Love and Hydrogen” by Jim Shepard.
The saddest story on my list, although number four gives it a run for the money. Meinert is a chameleon, a trickster of a man who has yet to articulate the profundity of his feelings for his younger lover, the handsome, affable, and deeply romantic Gnüss, despite the fact that they’ve been carrying on their affair in secret for years. Oh, and they’re both employed on the LZ 129 Hindenburg—you know, the zeppelin from the famous airship disaster. The one that caught fire on May 6th, 1937. And it’s May 6th, 1937.
Shepard takes you deep into the world of Meinert and Gnüss in just a few pages, so artfully and with such love that you’ll literally be weeping by the end of the story. And not just weeping with glee because some Nazis exploded, which is the reaction you might expect from yourself in this context. I never thought that a story that posits a non-zero chance that homophobia might be responsible for the end of the airship era (no steampunk because of bigots!) would have such a profound impact on my life. Though I think this writeup will be a bit shorter than the others on the list, because the source material is so brief, I cannot overstate the power of the relationship depicted in it…and, just as powerful, the implications about the way that fascism acts as yoke, slipknot, and noose to queer communities, taking away our freedoms inch by inexorable inch, until we’re left with nothing but a kiss in the dark.
“Love and Hydrogen” is a story that you can find in Jim Shephard’s collection of the same name, but I first read it in Best American Stories, the 2002 edition, where it had been collected after appearing in Harper’s. I had just turned fifteen, just maybe started to admit to myself that I was a lesbian, and I felt a profound pain when I read about the ways that this duo maneuvered around their world in order to love one another. Oh, the humanity!
2. Maxine Frizelle and Tammy Lauper in Coldheart Canyon, by Clive Barker.
You may begin to see a throughline here, especially if you take into account the year that Coldheart Canyon was published…it’s notable how many of my ‘favorite queer couples’ exist in literature I discovered right around when I was realizing my own sexual orientation. At the time I clung to pretty much any scraps I could find, fixing on them almost obsessively, but when it comes to queerness, Barker never offers anything less than a feast. And Coldheart Canyon is definitely a feast. Weirdness and horror and sexuality abound, and almost everyone is pan or bi. But the relationship that I loved the most wasn’t one I ever saw coming.
The story ostensibly revolves around an aging a-list actor named Todd Pickett, whose protective, take-no-crap agent, Maxine Frizelle, has accidentally chosen the worst possible “secluded Hollywood mansion” to rent out during his recovery from botched plastic surgery. But from there it spins out wildly, not just to the ghosts and devils that inhabit the titular canyon, but to a whole host of other characters, including our stealth protagonist, Tammy Lauper.
Tammy is the obsessive president of Todd’s fanclub, and at first she seems like a sketch of middle America too oversimplified to be worthy of Barker’s normal deft touch with characterization: overweight, unhappily married, hostile, and incapable of seeing herself for who she is. But over the course of the novel, Tammy reveals herself to have wellsprings of bravery and kindness far beyond anything that the reader—or Tammy herself—would have ever expected.
I would like to note here that Tammy and Maxine hate each other at first: Tammy hates Maxine for (rightfully) gatekeeping access to Todd, and Maxine hates Tammy for being an absolutely deranged fan who thinks her parasocial relationship with this world’s equivalent of Brad Pitt should give her unimpeded facetime with him.
In the sprawling cast of Coldheart Canyon, Tammy and Maxine are about the last two people you’d ever picture falling in love. BUT WAIT. By the end, Tammy has moved on from her unhealthy obsession with Todd, and along the way won the heart of her former nemesis, and the sweetness of the will-they-won’t-they bond between the two (they end up living together) is extremely poignant…a little reminder of the unlikely beauty of love in a sublimely terrible world.
3. Helen Francine Peters and Katina Marie (“Katchoo”) Choovanski in Strangers In Paradise, by Terry Moore.
I know that I am technically skirting (okay, bending) the boundaries of what can be considered literature here, but at fourteen years and ninety-plus issues, many of those with pages and pages of prose, I’d like to think that the comic series Strangers In Paradise has earned its place on bookshelves. Starting in 1993, SiP is a sprawling slice-of-life look at Katchoo, a badly-hurt lesbian artist who responds to the world with anger and sarcasm, and her ostensibly straight best friend, Francine, who wants a husband and kids and can’t quite get over her sleazy ex-boyfriend.
Here’s the setup. Katchoo is in love with Francine. Francine is unwilling to think about her sexuality in any but the most conventional terms. David Qin is an orbiter who is in love with Katchoo. Before you roll your eyes at this triangle, mouthing things about how I’m leading you along some Chasing Amy-esque primrose path, allow me to allay your concerns: the girl gets the girl.
However, along the way there’s more than a decade of intertwined lives and loves, shifting and growing sexualities, an international crime syndicate (!), harrowing stories of abuse, a breakup that seems really really final, an ever-expanding cast of characters who start off as jokes and become fully realized people, and a lot of great cover art, including an issue where Francine and Katchoo pose as Xena and Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess.
SiP isn’t without problems. A lot of cultural shifts took place while it was being published, and things that seem cliche today were fresh takes when the series was first running. Moore occasionally portrays woman-on-man abuse in a humorous light in the beginning of the run (which seemed like “whatever” to edgy teenage me in the early 2000s but reads dreadfully in hindsight) and only gets serious about it later. But the emotional ballast of the series, the relationship between Katchoo and Francine, holds up beautifully. As a young lesbian, seeing these fascinating women rendered so lovingly—so replete with flaws, physical insecurities, moments of weakness, and dark pasts—was a breath of fresh air in a world where a lot of queer stories revolved simply around being queer. Complicated lesbians, magical realism, and art. It’s all so romantic.
4. Miri and Leah in Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield.
Of all the queer couples I’ve loved most, this pairing is found in one of the very few books that didn’t rewire my brain as a teenager…it’s such a wonderful/horrible story that it managed to rewire my brain, like, a year ago.
So a lot of human life revolves around us being afraid to die, or to lose loved ones, while knowing it’s inevitable. Another equally large chunk of human life revolves around grappling with that loss when it actually happens. And a third big ol’ segment of life seems to revolve around pretending none of this will ever happen at all, aka living in abject denial.
If you’re rolling along in segment three, you may want to give this book a pass: Our Wives Under The Sea deals with grief and loss in the most visceral, genre-bending way I have encountered in literature outside of Shirley Jackson.
Miri’s wife, Leah, has gone missing on a deep-sea expedition financed by shadowy organization The Centre. Unbeknownst to Miri, who is frozen in limbo, Leah and her coworkers are actually getting their brains and bodies overwritten by an underwater eldritch abomination. When Leah reappears, it doesn’t take long for Miri to realize that she’s Come Back Wrong.
This alone would be a solid premise for a story—god knows that The Monkey’s Paw did a lot with even less—but Armfield isn’t content to just let us be majorly creeped-out. Each segment of the book pulls us fathom by inexorable fathom into deeper waters of grief, until everything is black as hell. Miri at first tries to ignore, then mitigate, and then finally face the changes in her wife, which is a solo process, even with Leah sitting stolidly (liquidly) in the bathtub, because of course Leah is already dead…her body just doesn’t know it yet.
The thing that makes this doomed couple so great is the love story woven in via flashbacks: a case history of two relatively ordinary, clever, likable, charismatic women falling in love in the modern world. Contemporary stories about dating and mating sometimes leave me cold, but Armfield shows us a blossoming relationship firmly lodged in reality (ironic, considering the unreality of the overall story), while somehow elevating Leah and Miri’s romance in the exact way that each and every one of us elevates our own relationships in our mind’s eye. Like real life, the largest revelations are sometimes spoken as an aside, or left unarticulated, or treated as little more than a wistful glance. Because of this, Miri is as effective a POV character as your own self, and the more you get to be her, the more painful the loss of Leah becomes. By the time you realize that you love this pair, it’s already too late (it always has been). But it isn’t all darkness. Like in life, our fictional heroine may yet survive the loss of her great love. Come for Cthulhu, stay for catharsis.
