the october country

🌈 Hey Rainbow Readers! Our final list is queer horror! This is for readers who loved books like Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White, Into the Drowning Deep by Seanan McGuire and The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass! For this list, we defined horror as stories that create feelings of fear, dread, repulsion, and terror in the audience. Horror feeds on audience’s deepest terrors by putting life’s most frightening and perplexing things at the center of attention

We hope you have enjoyed all ten of our Pride Month book lists, you can find them all saved in our guides. All of these lists feature between 10-20 books and all books on it will have under 5,000 Goodreads ratings, with a handful on each being under 1,000! Our goal is to introduce you to new books you might have never seen otherwise. These will be a mix of indie and traditional books; and range in age category!

Do you have any others you would add to this list? Authors please feel free to self-promote your queer horror books in the comments!

Books listed above their respective graphic.

ID: A post of five slides. Slide 1: The graphic is a dark background with a person wearing a gas mask in the middle holding a red glowing torch over their head. The torch is letting off smoke which trails about to make a skull, all the smoke is tinged red. In white font it reads “Queer horror books to read for pride”. At the bottom of the graphic it says @rainbowcratebookbox in all caps and white font. Slides 2-5: the same background but in the place of the title text are five book covers in two rows, the top has two covers while the bottom has three covers. At the bottom of the graphic it says @rainbowcratebookbox in all caps and white font. End ID. 

With A Vengeance by Freydís Moon

Cutting Your Teeth by Caylan MacRae

Transmuted by Eve Harms

The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu

You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron

Rapture by Saint Harlowe

Burn Down, Rise Up by Vincent Tirado

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez

It Came From the Closet edited by Joe Vallese

Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky

What We Devour by Linsey Miller

Chlorine by Jade Song

The Wicked and The Willing by Lianyu Tan

The Whites of Their Eyes edited by Xen

Queen of Teeth by Hailey Piper

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro

Scout’s Honor by Lily Anderson

The Girls are Never Gone by Sarah Glenn Marsh 

Queer Little Nightmares edited by David Ly & Daniel Zomparelli

Lee Mandelo's Summer Sons definitely deserves to be on any queer horror list!

An Interview with the Artist Behind the Covers for Goosebumps

As you might recall, Goosebumps was a phenomenally successful 1990s book series about preteens finding soft-core terror in the suburbs. The characters had names like Lucy/Lizzy/Billy/Andy and the author, R. L. Stine, had an unusual commitment to describing outfits. To be honest, it was hard to know what made Goosebumps so popular, except that they had mind-blowing covers.

Tim Jacobus was the New Jersey native behind those covers. In 1991 the children’s book publisher Scholastic asked him to tender for a new series of horror books. He got the job, and over the next decade Jacobus illustrated the full series of nearly 100 books.

Also over that decade, a nine year-old version of myself tried to copy his style. There was something so cool about those candy-colored, fish-eyed depictions of American horror. And ever since, I’ve wanted to talk to the guy. How did he and R. L. Stine get the formula so right? I called him up to ask him exactly that.

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I was a little old for Goosebumps (kids my age were just getting into Point Horror and The X-Files around then), but it’s interesting to me because it seems like the series and shows like Are You Afraid Of The Dark? were the gateway to horror fandom for a lot of people...