6 Spooky Books With Queer Romances to Devour This Halloween Season
There’s a reason why fear and love both quicken our pulses. They are two of the most extreme human conditions, igniting our bodies and minds into an instantaneous fight-or-flight response. After all, succumbing to the throes of passion can be just as dangerous as walking into a haunted house — you don’t know what’s on the other side.
As fall descends and Halloween approaches, we inevitably want to curl up with a good book, and there are a few recent examples of queer stories embracing the chills and thrills of the season.
Here are our suggestions for some queer novels to get you in the spooky spirit and maybe even make your heart skip a beat — from the romance or the scares.
If We Were Villains
M.L. Rio
The best romances can be the ones you don’t see coming, and that’s just one of the many surprises and pleasures of M.L. Rio’s bestselling murder mystery, If We Were Villains. At a prestigious Dellecher Classical Conservatory, students Oliver, James, Meredith, Alexander, Filippa, and Wren all live and die by the words and works of Shakespeare. They are a toxically tight group, strengthened by their talents and jeopardized by their willingness to commit to the part of good people. But when one of them dies, Oliver rises to take the blame. After serving a 10-year prison sentence, he recounts the truth of the matter and reveals something even he didn’t know — for all the ambition, torment, and talent that inflicted on each other, two of them may even have been in love.
Summer Sons
Lee Mandelo
The thing about the romance at the core of Lee Mandelo’s sweaty, sultry, and supernatural Summer Sons is that it hits its main character, Andrew, out of nowhere and like a ton of bricks. The same could be said about the reader. When Andrew heads to Vanderbilt University to unpack the aftermath of the death of his best friend, Eddie, he isn’t prepared to truly face what it’s like to live without the person with whom he has unknowingly and completely intertwined into who he is. Andrew and Eddie were more than friends, and not yet lovers. They were something more deeply felt than that. They were soulmates, and finally understanding that unleashes something just as powerful on Andrew, his new roommate, and a new man in his life. No one is prepared for the truth about who or what caused Eddie’s death. Throw in some pulse-quickening drag racing, and Summer Sons is the gothic country horror that will have your blood pumping from start to finish.
These Violent Delights
Micah Nemerever
In 1924, the real-life trial of teenage murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who meticulously hunted and killed a 14-year-old boy just to see if they could, electrified the nation. Micah Nemerever clearly took inspiration from the case for this novel set in 1970s Pittsburgh, where Paul Fleischer and Julian Fromme find themselves drawn to each other’s brilliant but mischievous minds. They believe they exist on an intellectual plane above everyone else, and to prove it, they decide to act on their darker impulses and plan the perfect murder. Rumors swirled that Leopold and Loeb were lovers, and Nemerever leans into that queer narrative to give Paul and Julian’s story an extra dose of unpredictability. Who says a crime of passion can’t be between the two killers?
The Shards
Bret Easton Ellis
For better or worse, there is something captivatingly surreal about a murder mystery hitting close to home. For Bret Ellis, he’s simultaneously drawn to and terrified of the grim and gruesome stories of the Trawler killer gripping the greater Los Angeles community in 1981. Bret is a senior in high school, dating the prettiest girl in school, but secretly gay and exploring that side of himself with more than one classmate. As the Trawler’s gruesome crimes start to move closer into Bret’s orbit, he becomes obsessed by the arrival of a new classmate — Robert Mallory, an effortlessly cool but hard to read question mark. Bret’s lust for everything, including the men in his life, clouds every part of his mind, a fog of hormones and hot men. But as he becomes the focus of the Trawler’s hunting and his secrets start to compound, the threat and intoxication of danger at every curve might just be the high he’s chasing. This fictional tale is inspired by author Bret Easton Ellis’ own life and is already in development at HBO.
As Dead Things Do
Tyler Christensen
Romance is a living, breathing thing. Our relationships bear the scars of our past and present transgressions, just like our houses bear the scars of time and the lives lived under their roofs. That’s the kind of collision Caleb finds when he moves to his husband’s family’s North Carolina home, hoping to save a broken marriage. But they can’t exactly focus on themselves and reignite their love story when there’s something lurking in the basement, something moving in the barn, and something beneath their feet. Author Tyler Christensen captures the chilling and unexpected claustrophobia of being in the middle of nowhere and how there is nothing scarier than having nowhere to run from what haunts us.
Nicked
M.T. Anderson
While this one won’t keep you up at night from a fear of the dark, M.T. Anderson’s adventure story has it all — deadly stakes, ancient corpses, and a slow burn romance between a young monk named Brother Nicephorus and a relic-hunter named Tyun. When Nicephorus starts having dreams of Saint Nicholas (not that one!), his fellow monks send him on a quest to find the dead saint’s body, which is said to have healing powers that could come in handy as their town succumbs to plague. Between corpses that ooze something we’d rather not spoil and scary booby traps in religious crypts, there is plenty to send a chill down your spine. And that doesn’t even include the opposites attract flirting between Nicephorus and Tyun.
