As much as I love all the happy go-lucky happy ending queer books out there where everything gets better, I wanna feel icky and gross about everything in a soulcrushingly cruel universe but also maybe has some girls kissing in it. I’d really love something hard sci-fi, or maybe some period pieces with fantastical elements to them a la lovecraftian horror? I love horror. I’m also a really big fan of uncomfortable topics in the psychological horror genre; I recently played through a game called ‘The Coffin of Andy and Leyley’ that dealt with a lot of things like cannibalism, parenticide, grooming, sociopathy, toxic codependency, etc. I think they’re very interesting things to analyize as aspects of a character that could be fun to explore!
The big thing I’m looking for is a romance story where the romance isn’t the focus. I recently read The Tiger’s Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera which I absolutely adored because of how well written it was but also because of how much of the lore and world revolved NOT around the characters falling in love. There was plot outside of just lovey dovey romance which really made everything feel all the more grounded in reality and let me play in the space.
I’d love something with specifically WLW leaning tendancies, or explicitly non-binary or trans characters since I never see those enough. But most of all, I want to feel the kind of icky after reading it where you walk around in a haze for the next few days trying to decipher what exact emotion you feel and knowing that without reading the book absolutely no one will understand your internal struggle <3
by eldritchterror
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The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K Jemisin
The Traitor Baru Cormorant
The First Sister by Linden A. Lewis might suit you. It’s a grim space opera about a slave in love with her female captain.
It’s got trans people, non binary, gay. It seeks to tell a very messy story where not everyone is good and not everything works out in a completely happy way.
There’s the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. The last book isn’t out yet, but I’m betting on it, not having a good ending.
Its tag line is often “Lesbian Necromancers in Space”
The books are: Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth, and Alecto the Ninth (not out yet).
It can be a little hard to read but absolutely worth it
**An Unkindness of Ghosts** by Rivers Solomon
In “The Dark Beyond the Stars” by Frank M. Robinson, everyone is bi (but the protagonist is male, so it’s not perfect for you). The sexual/romantic elements are secondary to the plot and there’s no ‘true love interest’. It’s a depressing-as-fuck book about an intergenerational space ship hopelessly, endlessly searching the stars for signs of alien life.
“Queen of Teeth” by Hailey Piper is a horror novella about a lesbian who wakes up with teeth in her vagina, and then things get worse. I love it because it doesn’t waste any time with a ‘oh no, I’m a monster,’ whining. The protagonist is like, “I have a monster in my vagina now, cool.”
“Sister, Maiden, Monster” by Lucy A. Snyder is a gross-out body horror with lots of tributes to Lovecraft. It starts out with a pandemic (not Covid, this one makes people zombies) and things spiral from there. Pretty much an entirely female cast, only queer relationships depicted.
You may like books by Kameron Hurley. She has a very meaty, visceral style of worldbuilding and most of what I’ve read by her has an ambiguous ending at best. However, I wouldn’t say she writes *horror* though there are horror elements, especially in The Stars Are Legion which is a cosmic horror space opera.
Her books also include lots of girls kissing and other queerness, such as the only accurate intersex character I’ve seen yet in fiction in her Bel Dame Apocrypha series.
Not grimdark and with a complex happy ending, but Ancillary Justice in the Imperial Radch universe by Anne Leckie is definitely not happy go lucky, it’s very queer in gender and relationship ways, and it’s complex sci fi with a Very morally ambiguous protagonist with some fucked up bits.
Hell Followed With Us tries to have a happy ending, but it just doesn’t. It’s also very subtle on the romance!