Queer SF - August 2027
August 1, 2027
White Trash Witchcraft — Rowan Brighton Brown
Genre: Horror
Rep: Queer
Southern inheritances are always dark—whether it’s a penchant for pills, a blood-soaked family farm, or an ancient magic. Sierra wants to break the generational curses, but when an otherworldly illness threatens her family, she must choose which monsters to slay and which to become.
Growing up on a farm in the foothills, Sierra learned from her granny’s folk magic and her dad’s addiction that healing comes at a price. By now she’s used to the opioids that were meant to help her dad leading to distance and disappearances instead, but after he misses her graduation, she’s sure there’s something else going on.
After tracking her dad’s last-known location to the local methadone clinic, Sierra meets Blight, an intoxicating and infuriating intern who offers her the chance to work with them on the clinic’s harm reduction program and gain access to information about what happened to her Dad. As Sierra and Blight explore their relationship and the opioid-riddled underworld of the Blue Ridge, they find a disease creeping through users’ veins like kudzu—and it looks a lot more like Granny’s magic than any mortal infection.
But in order for Sierra to uncover her family’s true history and heal the cycles of addiction and abuse, she must embrace and inhabit the same dark magic that started it all.
This queer Appalachian horror examines the monstrous consequences of generational trauma alongside the backwoods magic of methadone, motorcycles, and Mothman.
Link: Goodreads
August 3, 2027
Boycraft — Aries Amian
Genre: Horror
Rep: Queer; trans girl MC
Tired of her God-haunted provincial town and determined to finally shed the boy body the world assigned her, Karma escapes to the city on an art scholarship. There, among artists and misfits, she discovers a world where reinvention is celebrated. Through lipstick, drag bars, and midnight adventures, she begins piecing together her girlhood. The self she builds is louder, angrier, and unwilling to disappear. But with it, resurfaces something older: a dark ancestral magic that has been waiting for her to remember it.
Then Karma meets Frankie, a bleach-blonde, punk frat boy who shows her what genuine love and acceptance feels like. But when a freak accident leaves Karma cradling Frankie’s corpse, Karma refuses to accept his death. Drawing on everything she has learned as an artist—and the rage, grief, and inherited magic she’s been repressing—Karma begins boycraft. With flesh. With stolen boy parts. Arms. Tendons. A torso. And Frankie’s head.
But the thing Karma resurrects is not the person she lost. As Frankie becomes something beyond the memory she built him from, Karma must confront a truth she has spent her life resisting: nothing we create belongs entirely to us. Our art, our identities, and the people we love are shaped by the trauma we inherit, the people who leave their mark on us, and the parts of ourselves we cannot simply cut away.
Link: Kobo
Hollow is the Heart — H.E. Edgmon
Genre: Dark fantasy
Rep: Trans man MC; MLM
Hollow is the Heart is an obsession-laced story of love and betrayal between two men and the monster they unleash, from acclaimed author H.E. Edgmon.
Single trans dad Icarus has lived on the outskirts of Red’s Hollow his whole life and never fit in: He’s too Native and too poor for the privileged students of Domitor University, but not Native enough to send his daughter to the tribal school.
When Ick falls for Laramie, his modest world collides with the exclusive, transient academic world. But Laramie isn’t like the other students at Domitor. He’s strange, lonely, and drawn to the fringes of the known world—including Red, a monster of local legend.
As Laramie’s obsession with Red grows, he reveals long-buried truths about Ick’s desperate ancestors, and together they discover Red is alive, hungry, and—with the right sacrifice—completely within Ick’s control. It’s not long before Laramie’s fixation drags the two men and their monster into a toxic spiral of power, lust, violence, and control.
Eerie, intoxicating, and flat-out horny—Hollow is the Heart is about the monsters we let in when we come upon something we don’t understand and attempt to make it our own.
Link: Macmillan
August 10, 2027
Four Bastards and a Baby — Travis Baldree
Genre: Fantasy, litRPG
Rep: Queer
Join #1 New York Times bestselling author Travis Baldree on a magic-filled adventure in a dangerous new world, where four misfits must work together to escape an ever-changing dungeon.
Welcome to the Deepdown. An impossible subterranean labyrinth, where everything is deadly and the world is ever-changing. The only thing that stays the same is that no one ever escapes.
Until now.
The sly half-devil Brindle has received a cryptic message from the Deepdown deliver a mysterious egg to the top floor, and your escape is assured.
To carry the strange egg safely through the infinite floors of monsters and murderers, Brindle must recruit the worst companions possible—a pacifist blacksmith, a genius tinker with a deadly secret, and two enigmatic sisters, one of whom hates his guts, the other trapped inside a sword.
That would all be trouble enough, but everything gets infinitely worse when the egg unexpectedly hatches, revealing the most horrifying creature imaginable—a human baby.
She might just be the answer to all their prayers—or the most deadly threat the Deepdown has ever seen.
Either way, she’s cute as all hell.
Link: Macmillan
August 24, 2027
Sunlit Uplands — Jo Walton
Genre: Science fiction
Rep: Queer
Sunlit Uplands is an electrifying found family road trip across a multiverse of Everything Everywhere All At Once from Hugo Award winning author Jo Walton.
What makes our world unique in the multiverse?
How much would really change if people preferred lime to orange, or Al Gore was elected in 2000?
Would the other you really be that different if they’d been born a girl, or left-handed, or in Iowa?
When Sam’s mother explains that their family can move between the worlds, answers at least as many questions as it raises.
But Sam can never figure out how to worldwalk, even though all the other Sams in the other worlds can. So when disaster strikes while they’re left alone, it’s all on Sam to figure out what to do...
Link: Macmillan
The Beast and the Saint of Silence — Neon Yang
Genre: Fantasy
Rep: Queer; genderfluid MC
From the acclaimed author of Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame and The Black Tides of Heaven comes an epic tale of love, betrayal, and obsession across lifetimes—because some bonds, no matter how twisted, cannot be broken.
Five hundred years ago, a young man fell in love with a prince and helped him unlock the secret of immortality. This gift was bestowed upon the few closest to the Emperor, so that each immortal was reborn again and again, their one life lived across many mortal bodies.
When the young man, Ennidar, dared to steal immortality for himself, he was forsaken by the prince who had once pledged his undying love. Ennidar was punished with imprisonment, locked away in a tower to live out not only that life but every life to come in complete isolation.
But Ennidar has not been idle in their imprisonment. They have spent ten lives plotting their escape. Now, it is time to act.
In this life, Ennidar will finally have her revenge. Against the captors who tormented her. Against the Empire that hunted her. And against the prince who betrayed her very soul all those years ago.
Link: Macmillan