Guest post written by Night of the Living Queers co-editors Shelly Page & Alex Brown
Shelly Page is a young adult contemporary fantasy and horror writer making her editorial debut with Night of the Living Queers. By day, she’s a practicing attorney representing homeless LGBTQ+ youth of color. By night, she’s planning ways to scare her readers while simultaneously awakening their inner gay. She’s an oil painter, a lover of autumn, and possibly the only lesbian who doesn’t own a cat.
Alex Brown loves rooting for the final girl—especially if she’s a monster. Alex has a short story in the instant Indie bestselling young adult folk horror anthology, The Gathering Dark. Alex is also the cocreator of The Bridge, a narrative fiction podcast that’s had over one million downloads to date! Alex’s sapphic YA horror-comedy debut is Damned If You Do. Alex lives in Los Angeles with her partner and their two very chaotic cats. Night of the Living Queers is her editorial debut. As far as she knows, she hasn’t summoned an Eldritch God who loves pizza . . . yet.
Night of the Living Queers is out August 29th.
Night of the Living Queers is a YA horror anthology set on Halloween night during a blue moon. Thirteen stories explore how Halloween can be more than just candies and frights, but a night where anything is possible. Each short story is told through the lens of a different BIPOC teen and the Halloween night that changes their lives forever.
Horror is a genre that lends to the exploration of fear which in turn allows for deep character growth. In this sense, it’s the perfect genre to explore the intersection of queerness and ethnicity because it encourages the exploration of the darker parts of humanity while offering a chance for queer people of color to be authentic without fear of judgment or reproach. Halloween in particular is a time when many people feel they no longer have to hide the best parts of themselves. This is true for everyone but particularly so for QPOC individuals. The intersection of queerness and ethnic diversity is functionally invisible in most things, horror included. Queer people of color have been pushed to the margins and subjected to dehumanizing stereotypes which warps their perception and authenticity. Through the horror genre, these stereotypes can be deconstructed. Night of the Living Queers allows queer readers to reclaim that narrative and celebrate the complexity of their identities.
Horror is also a great avenue for exploring concepts like fear and otherness, as it provides a way for us to turn things that may not necessarily be solid and tangible into something that we can point to and say, “See? I told you there was something lurking in the dark!” Sometimes it can be hard to articulate how it feels to not belong, or not feel wanted, or loved, or seen. But that’s where the monsters come in. Our negative emotions and experiences can take the shape of something new. Something we can understand.
Whether it’s a vampire, Babadook, ghost, the shapeshifting demon in It Follows, or countless other creatures from folklore, myth, and our collective storytelling consciousness, the fear of something unknown – something waiting just at the edge of your consciousness, or out of sight – has been with us for as long as humans have existed.
What first started out as a survival instinct – maybe those glowing eyes in the bushes belong to something that would like to eat you – has, unfortunately, turned into a way to alienate people who fall outside of a falsely imposed societal “norm.” If you don’t look a certain way, act a certain way, love a certain way, society is very quick to teach you that you’re not human anymore. Instead, you’re the thing with yellow eyes waiting to eat the human.
And that’s where horror becomes fun. Because, while we all are human (despite what society would lead us to believe), there’s also something cathartic about being the monster. Or defeating the monster. Or, in some cases, falling in love with the monster.
Horror (and life) are both about choices. Do you run from the monster? Embrace it? Or step into that dark room, take your power back, and face it?
And for additional YA books releasing this Fall that explore queerness through the horror lens, check out:
The Spirit Bares its Teeth by A.J. White (September 5, 2023)
London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.
After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.
The Forest Demands its Due by Kosoko Jackson (October 3, 2023)
Regent Academy has a long and storied history in Winslow, Vermont, as does the forest that surrounds it. The school is known for molding teens into leaders, but its history is far more nefarious.
Seventeen-year-old Douglas Jones wants nothing to do with Regent’s king-making; he’s just trying to survive. But then a student is murdered and, for some reason, by the next day no one remembers him having ever existed, except for Douglas and the groundskeeper’s son, Everett Everley. In his determination to uncover the truth, Douglas awakens a horror hidden within the forest, unearthing secrets that have been buried for centuries. A vengeful creature wants blood as payment for a debt more than 300 years in the making—or it will swallow all of Winslow in darkness.
And for the first time in his life, Douglas might have a chance to grasp the one thing he’s always felt was missing: power. But if he’s not careful, he will find out that power has a tendency to corrupt absolutely everything.
Beholder by Ryan La Sala (October 3, 2023)
Athanasios “Athan” Bakirtzis hasn’t had an easy life. Orphaned by a fire at a young age, he’s had to rely on his charm, his under-the-table job as an art handler, and the generosity of family friends to care for his ailing Yiayia, his grandmother.
But Athan also has a secret: a hereditary power that allows him to rewind the reflection in any mirror, peering into its recent past. Superstitious Yiayia calls the family ability a curse, and has long warned him never to use it. For Athan, who’s survived this long by keeping to the realm of the real, this is a perfectly agreeable arrangement.
Until the night of the party. After being invited to a penthouse soiree for New York’s art elite, Athan breaks his grandmother’s rule during a trip to the bathroom, turning back his reflection for just a moment. Then he hears a slam against the bathroom door, followed by a scream. Athan peers outside, only to be pushed back in by a boy his age. The boy gravely tells him not to open the door, then closes Athan in.
Before Athan can process what’s happening, more screams follow, and the party descends into chaos. When he finally emerges, he discovers a massacre where the victims appear to have arranged themselves into a disturbingly elegant sculpture—and Athan’s mysterious savior is nowhere to be found.
Something evil is compelling people to destructive acts, a presence that’s been hiding behind Athan’s reflection his whole life, watching and biding its time. Soon, he’s swept up in a supernatural conspiracy that spans New York, of occult high societies and deadly eldritch designs. If beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, what can it do to us once it’s inside?
Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng (November 7, 2023)
After a shocking scandal that abruptly ended her teen popstar career, eighteen-year-old Sunny Lee spends her days longing for her former life and cyberstalking her ex-BFF and groupmate, Candie. The two were once inseparable, but that was then—before the tragedy and heartache they left in their wake.
In the here and now, Sunny is surprised to discover that Candie is attending a new K-pop workshop in her hometown. Candie might be there chasing stardom, but Sunny can’t resist the chance to join her and finally confront their traumatic history. Because she still can’t figure out what happened that horrible night when Mina, the third in their tight-knit trio, jumped to her death. Or if the dark and otherworldly secrets she and Candie were keeping had something to do with it . . .
But the workshop doesn’t bring the answers Sunny had hoped for, nor a happy reunion with Candie. Instead, Sunny finds herself haunted by ghostly visions while strange injuries start happening to her competitors—followed by even stranger mutilations to their bodies. In her race to survive, Sunny will have to expose just who is behind the carnage—and if Candie is out for blood once more.
And, while not technically horror, we’d be remiss not to mention Godly Heathens by H.E. Edgmon (November 28, 2023)
Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teen living in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia. Known for being their peers’ queer awakening, Gem leans hard on charm to disguise the anxious mess they are beneath. The only person privy to their authentic self is another trans kid, Enzo, who’s a thousand long, painful miles away in Brooklyn.
But even Enzo doesn’t know about Gem’s dreams, haunting visions of magic and violence that have always felt too real. So how the hell does Willa Mae Hardy? The strange new girl in town acts like she and Gem are old companions, and seems to know things about them they’ve never told anyone else.
When Gem is attacked by a stranger claiming to be the Goddess of Death, Willa Mae saves their life and finally offers some answers. She and Gem are reincarnated gods who’ve known and loved each other across lifetimes. But Gem – or at least who Gem used to be – hasn’t always been the most benevolent deity. They’ve made a lot of enemies in the pantheon—enemies who, like the Goddess of Death, will keep coming.
It’s a good thing they’ve still got Enzo. But as worlds collide and the past catches up with the present, Gem will discover that everyone has something to hide.
