I don’t need to tell you that it’s been a scary year to be trans. The horrors are blasted across our newsfeeds on a daily basis. There is no shortage of scary shit out there, but I find myself turning more and more to horror literature to escape and make sense of our own terrifying reality. It shouldn’t be surprising then that this year has been a standout year for trans writers in horror, publishing some of the best new works in the genre.
Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin
At first glance, Black Flame feels like a surprising change of pace for Gretchen Felker-Martin after her first two novels wowed with their sense of scope and grotesque horror imagery. Black Flame is a fraction of the length of Manhunt or Cuckoo and, while Felker-Martin hasn’t completely foregone her love of viscera-soaked set pieces, the scares for this novella feel more cerebral and inventive. After a rough breakup with her former girlfriend Frankie, Ellen Kramer, a deeply repressed film archivist, has abandoned her brief dalliance into 80s queer culture and taken a job with an organization dedicated the preservation of conservative film. It’s a mundane, if morally compromised job, until Ellen is tasked with the restoration of Black Flame, a nightmarish queer horror feature uncovered from Nazi Germany. As the movie’s impossible imagery haunts her sleeping and waking hours, Ellen is forced to confront the truths about herself that she’s tried her hardest to bury. While it’s unlikely to become the zeitgeist seizing phenomenon of her debut, Black Flame is Felker-Martin’s most complex and haunting novel and is an incredible showcase for her prose, which is atmospheric and biting. Also, it may have one of the best endings of any novel you’ll read this year.
Chasers by Mariah Darling and Eve Harms
The literary equivalent of a late-night grindhouse show, Mariah Darling and Eve Harms’s novella, Chasers, is a gory and subversive exploitation thriller that’s filled with off-the-walls plot turns and packs quite the punch for its short page length. When Lenora, the lead singer and songwriter for an up-and-coming indie rock band, finds her new apartment it seems like a steal, especially for Los Angeles. It also doesn’t hurt that her new landlord/neighbor, Ryan, is easy on the eyes. Sure, there’s a mysterious peephole in her wall into her neighbor Jane’s apartment that doubles as the set for some extreme porn shoots, but who Lenora isn’t about to judge a fellow trans woman for participating in sex work. However, this is just something a little off about Jane and the animal masked men she performs with and it’s not long before the off-putting transforms into the terrifying. I won’t spoil where the story goes from here, but it’s called Chasers for a reason.
A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper
Hailey Piper has quickly made herself known as one of our best contemporary writers of cosmic horror, so it feels only natural that she take a swing at reimagining one of the genre’s essential texts, Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow. Piper reimagines Chambers’s famously cursed book not purely as a maddening portal to the eldritch realms of Carcosa, but as an addictive source of euphoric pleasure injected into the bedroom play of a queer couple stuck in a sexual rut. When Bianca offers her girlfriend Carmen, whose desire has become inescapably wrapped up in the homophobic abuse she suffered as a young adult, a glimpse at The King in Yellow it ignites a long absent fire in their fucking. The mysterious play soon takes a hold of Carmen and the boundaries between play, player, and reality itself quickly become blurred. Genre diehards will find much to chew on in how Piper reimagines and twists Chambers’s original conceit, offering new glimpses into The King in Yellows’s script and cosmology while also charting the implosion of a queer love triangle pushed to its edges.
Herculine by Grace Byron
Queer folk horror is having a moment, and Grace Byron’s debut novel Herculine delivers the trans girl Wicker Man we’ve all been waiting for. And yes the idea of a trans feminine utopian commune may be as sexy and liberating as it sounds, but Byron mines this conceit to critique some of the most pervasive and toxic dynamics that infest trans spaces no matter how purely intentioned they may be. Imagine Nevada but with far more demonic rituals and evisceration. Still, Herculine is maybe most fascinating as an exploration of religious trauma and the complicated relationship between queer people and the faith that defined their upbringing. It’s a surprisingly untouched subject matter for a genre that so regularly engages with the hellish and demonic and it makes for a novel that is as heartfelt and vulnerable as it is frightening.
Moonflow by Bitter Karella
Mushrooms and queer cults seem to be some of the running trends in this year’s trans horror and Bitter Karella’s reality warping debut, Moonflow, has both. Sarah, an amateur mycologist who is closer to her cat than most people, makes her living growing and harvesting hallucinogenic mushrooms, a business that’s hardly as lucrative as it sounds. When her friend and biggest client tasks her with procuring the mysterious King’s Breakfast, a powerful psychedelic native to one impenetrable forest in northern California, Sarah eagerly accepts, if only so she can get another glimpse of a gorgeous green goddess that visited her during one particularly potent trip. However, Sarah isn’t the only one in the woods who seeks the mysterious Green Lady and the secrets and truths she carries. There is quite simply nothing like Moonflow. It’s deliriously strange and bursting with narrative upending story twists and turns. I promise that even if I were to describe the full plot in detail, it wouldn’t come close to capturing the experience of reading Bitter Karella’s novel. Don’t even get me started on the raccoons.
Root Rot by Saskia Nislow
Saskia Nislow’s masterful horror novella, Root Rot, has infected my brain and haunted my dreams more than any other book in recent memory. Nislow’s story of a family reunion that is slowly pulled apart by unseen forces, strange transformations, and a landscape in rebellion is subtly unnerving and destabilizing that feels like the unholy child of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation. Told through a fracturing collective first-person point of view, Root Rot’s prose is as beautiful and entrancing as a vibrant but toxic fungal growth, hiding unexpected scares beneath otherwise innocuous sentences. Nislow has plenty to say about generational abuse and environmental exploitation, but it’s their depiction of the alienation of queer childhood that leaves a lasting mark.
Student Bodies by TT Madden
It’s shocking to me how little trans body swapping horror there is (and no Freaky doesn’t count). Thankfully, TT Madden’s novella Student Bodies delivers on that premise and then some. Channeling Talk to Me’s premise of a viral game of demonic possession, Madden’s ensemble cast of characters become wrapped up in a round-robin body swapping game that’s become the obsession of a college fraternity. As changing and exchanging forms unlocks hidden desires and identities among the game’s players, the mysterious skull at the rituals center sets its own plans into motion. Student Bodies has monsters and murderous frat bros, but Madden’s writing shines most in their exploration in the complicated relationships we have with our bodies and how easily that can or can’t be untethered.
They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran
I will admit that I am not much of reader of YA fiction, but Trang Thanh Tran’s work of eco/body horror, They Bloom at Night, leaves its mark regardless of its intended demographic. Noon and her mother spend their days fishing in the red algae infested waters of their Louisiana hometown, which has been abandoned by the federal government following a series of ecological disasters. Something more than climate-change-induced fallout haunts the waters that Noon and her family call home. Mutated sea creatures patrol the depths. Their former friends and neighbors have begun to disappear. And, Noon’s own body, long a source of frustration and dysphoria, has begun to transform as gills sprout from her neck and her teeth sharpen into shark-like arrowheads. Trang Thanh Tran uses familiar YA tropes of youth resistance and queer found family to touch on larger themes of grief, healing, and cultural diaspora to create a novel that is both eerie and moving.
Uncanny Valley Girls by Zefyr Lisowski
Okay, so this isn’t a novel, but any list of recent trans horror would be incomplete without Zefyr Lisowski’s stellar collection of essays, Uncanny Valley Girls. Lisowski is far from the first critic or scholar to draw connections between classic horror films and transness, but her insights here not only bring thoughtful new readings classic (and far more dubious) films but are paired with moments of personal reflection that’re disarmingly vulnerable and emotionally honest. (Her argument about the inherent trans femininity of werewolves is particularly great.) Uncanny Valley Girls knows how to challenge the ableist, racist, and classist themes of the genre while also engaging with them as nuanced works of art and pop cultural significance. Also, as her recent Lambda win for Transgender Poetry would attest, Lisowski’s prose is stunning and evocative.
You Weren’t Meant to be Human by Andrew Joseph White
Andrew Joseph White made a name for himself writing YA horror, but you wouldn’t have guessed that from reading his first harrowing and gore-soaked novel for adults. Set amidst the small mountain towns of West Virginia, You Weren’t Meant to Be Human blends dysphoria-infused body horror with a stealthy sci-fi horror akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. After fleeing his family and birth sex, Craine becomes indebted to one of many hives, wriggling masses of extraterrestrial worms with vague and far-reaching plots and schemes, scattered throughout Appalachia. The hive offers him a new start and safety from a world that has grown increasingly hostile to trans people. However, when Craine discovers that he’s pregnant after a sexual encounter with his fellow Hive enforcer Levi, his new masters demand that he carry the fetus growing inside him to term. As Craine’s body turns against him he’s forced to reevaluate his loyalty to the Hive and the nefarious plans they have for the planet. White’s novel is a brutal, squirm inducing read of supernatural and banal violence that’s rendered in incisive, visceral prose that evokes the work of trans horror icons like William Joseph Martin.
