Brace yourself for an extreeeemely killer lineup, because that’s what you’re getting with Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, along with, you know, the the titular tales. Coming to you in October 2021 from Neon Hemlock Press, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness is a speculative anthology edited by dave ring of queer witches, infinite darkness and the knife edge between the sacred and the profane.
Unfettered Hexes asks you to sling salt in a circle, call the corners, and breathe life into the unutterable cadences that call forth the void. Find your coven, craft new rituals and hex your enemies.
This anthology launched on Kickstarter and ran December 2nd to January 1st, hitting 207% of the initial goal. Pre-orders are currently open via Backerkit.
The anthology will include work from:
- Rasha Abdulhadi
- Sharang Biswas
- C.B. Blanchard
- Die Booth
- Priya Chand
- Tania Chen
- H.A. Clarke
- Kel Coleman
- Amelia Fisher
- Craig L. Gidney
- Diana Hurlburt
- Tamara Jerée
- Ruth Joffre
- Marianne Kirby
- L.D. Lewis
- Danny Lore
- Hanna A. Nirav
- Chelsea Obodoechina
- Suzan Palumbo
- Nicasio Reed
- Almah LaVon Rice
- Jordan Shiveley
- Cecilia Tan
- R.J. Theodore
- Elizabeth Twist
The book will also include:
- Comics from Grace Fong, Caleb Hosalla & Viane Londoño
- Story games from Mercedes Acosta & Allie Bustion
- Art from Matt Spencer & Frances P
Matt Spencer is also working with editor dave ring on an oracle deck inspired by the stories from the anthology. (You can also preview the mostly-completed cards here. )
And now, the jawdropping cover, illustrated by Robin Ha!
What’s that? You wanna see the full flap?? Yeah, we’ve got that too!
dave ring is a queer editor and writer of speculative fiction living in Washington, DC. He is the publisher and managing editor of Neon Hemlock Press, and the co-editor of Baffling Magazine. He is also a chair emeritus of the OutWrite LGBTQ Book Festival.
He is the editor of the upcoming anthology Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness (Neon Hemlock Press, 2021) as well as Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was (Mason Jar Press, 2018) and Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn’t Die (Neon Hemlock Press, 2020).
dave was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, a 2018 resident of Futurescapes and Disquiet, and a 2019 resident of Sundress Academy for the Arts. His short fiction has been featured in numerous publications including Fireside Fiction, Podcastle, and A Punk Rock Future. Find him at www.dave-ring.com or @slickhop on Twitter.
Welcome to England, where the Protectorate enforces the Public Good. Here, there are rules for everything – what to eat, what to wear, what to do, what to say, what to read, what to think, who to obey, who to hate, who to love. Your safety is assured, so long as you follow the rules.
“It’s not every day you get to put the fear of Medusa into a god.”
Sky Baker may be openly gay, but in his small, insular town, making sure he was invisible has always been easier than being himself. Determined not to let anything ruin his senior year, Sky decides to make a splash at his high school’s annual beach bum party by asking his crush, Ali, to prom—and he has thirty days to do it.
When Otto and Xavier Shin declare their love, an aunt gifts them a trip on a sleeper train to mark their new commitment—and to get them out of her house. Setting off with their pet mongoose, Otto and Xavier arrive at their sleepy local train station, but quickly deduce that The Lucky Day is no ordinary locomotive. Their trip on this former tea-smuggling train has been curated beyond their wildest imaginations, complete with mysterious and welcoming touches, like ingredients for their favorite breakfast. They seem to be the only people onboard, until Otto discovers a secretive woman who issues a surprising message. As further clues and questions pile up, and the trip upends everything they thought they knew, Otto and Xavier begin to see connections to their own pasts, connections that now bind them together.
JD Scott conjures up unruly personae that are propelled by queer fantasies, youthful regrets, incantations, and apocryphal parables. Mask for Mask is a kaleidoscopic poetry collection, one that is both formally innovative and an imaginative descent into LGBTQ+ undergrounds and underworlds.
Seventeen-year-old Pakistani immigrant Zara Hossain has been leading a fairly typical life in Corpus Christi, Texas, since her family moved there for her father to work as a pediatrician. While dealing with the Islamophobia that she faces at school, Zara has to lay low, trying not to stir up any trouble and jeopardize their family’s dependent visa status while they await their green card approval, which has been in process for almost nine years.
Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real and imagined queer and trans communities.
Thirteen-year-old Eli likes baggy clothes, baseball caps, and one girl in particular. Her seventeen-year-old sister Anna is more traditionally feminine; she loves boys and staying out late. They are sisters, and they are also the only family each can count on. Their dad has long been out of the picture, and their mom lives at the mercy of her next drink. When their mom lands herself in enforced rehab, Anna and Eli are left to fend for themselves. With no legal guardian to keep them out of foster care, they take matters into their own hands: Anna masquerades as Aunt Lisa, and together she and Eli hoard whatever money they can find. But their plans begin to unravel as quickly as they were made, and they are always way too close to getting caught.
“History” sounds really official. Like it’s all fact. Like it’s definitely what happened.
Naomi Grant has built her life around going against the grain. After the sex-positive start-up she cofounded becomes an international sensation, she wants to extend her educational platform to live lecturing. Unfortunately, despite her long list of qualifications, higher ed won’t hire her.
Tina never worries about being “ordinary”
New York, 1949
When twin heirs are born in Tourin, their fates are decided at a young age. While Izaveta remained at court to learn the skills she’d need as the future queen, Asya was taken away to train with her aunt, the mysterious Firebird, who ensured magic remained balanced in the realm.
Derek is LitenVärld’s most loyal employee. He lives and breathes the job, from the moment he wakes up in a converted shipping container at the edge of the parking lot to the second he clocks out of work 18 hours later. But after taking his first ever sick day, his manager calls that loyalty into question. An excellent employee like Derek, an employee made to work at LitenVärld, shouldn’t need time off.
Piper Kitts is spending the summer living with her grandmother, training at the barn of a former Olympic horseback rider, and trying to get over her ex-girlfriend. Much to Piper’s dismay, her grandmother is making her face her fear of driving head-on by taking lessons from a girl in town.
It’s the summer before middle school and eleven-year-old Bug’s best friend Moira has decided the two of them need to use the next few months to prepare. For Moira, this means figuring out the right clothes to wear, learning how to put on makeup, and deciding which boys are cuter in their yearbook photos than in real life. But none of this is all that appealing to Bug, who doesn’t particularly want to spend more time trying to understand how to be a girl. Besides, there’s something more important to worry about: A ghost is haunting Bug’s eerie old house in rural Vermont…and maybe haunting Bug in particular. As Bug begins to untangle the mystery of who this ghost is and what they’re trying to say, an altogether different truth comes to light—Bug is transgender.
Prince Tal has long awaited his coming-of-age tour. After spending most of his life cloistered behind palace walls as he learns to keep his forbidden magic secret, he can finally see his family’s kingdom for the first time. His first taste of adventure comes just two days into the journey, when their crew discovers a mysterious prisoner on a burning derelict vessel.
With no water, no air, and no native life, the planet Gora is unremarkable. The only thing it has going for it is a chance proximity to more popular worlds, making it a decent stopover for ships traveling between the wormholes that keep the Galactic Commons connected. If deep space is a highway, Gora is just your average truck stop.
After an embarrassing loss to her ex-girlfriend in their first basketball game of the season, seventeen-year-old Scottie Zajac gets into a fender bender with the worst possible person: her nemesis, Irene Abraham, head cheerleader for the Fighting Reindeer.
People come to me because I fix things.
Jetta is in the center of a war. With her magical power, she could save everyone, save her country… or she could destroy it all.
Oscar is a grouch.
Dean Foster knows he’s a trans guy. He’s watched enough YouTube videos and done enough questioning to be sure. But everyone at his high school thinks he’s a lesbian—including his girlfriend Zoe, and his theater director, who just cast him as a “nontraditional” Romeo. He wonders if maybe it would be easier to wait until college to come out. But as he plays Romeo every day in rehearsals, Dean realizes he wants everyone to see him as he really is now––not just on the stage, but everywhere in his life. Dean knows what he needs to do. Can playing a role help Dean be his true self?
Los Angeles, 1986.
At age nineteen, the queer narrator of Green Glass Ghosts steps off a bus in downtown Vancouver, a city where the faceless condo towers of the wealthy loom over the streets to the east where folks are just trying to get by, against the deceptively beautiful backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling ocean. It’s the year 2000, and the world is still mostly analogue–pagers are the best way to get ahold of someone and resumes are printed out on paper and dropped off in person, and what’s this new fad called webmail?
The sequel to Anna K, set over the course of the next summer, as the characters come to terms with Vronsky’s tragic death
As one of the only remaining autistics in the universe, Xandri Corelel has faced a lot of hardship, and she’s earned her place as the head of Xeno-Liaisons aboard the first contact ship Carpathia. But her skill at negotiating with alien species is about to be put to the ultimate test.
Sonia Hartl is the author of Not Your #Lovestory and Have a Little Faith in Me (Page Street), which received a starred review in BookPage and earned nominations for the Georgia Peach Book Award, YALSA’s Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers, and ALA’s Rise: A Feminist Book Project List. She’s a member of SCBWI and the Managing Director for Pitch Wars 2020. When she’s not writing or reading, she’s enjoying pub trivia, marathoning Disney movies, or taking walks outside in the fall. She lives in Grand Rapids, MI, with her husband and two daughters. Follow her on Twitter @SoniaHartl1.
For fans of George and Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World, a heartfelt coming of age story about a nonbinary character navigating a binary world.
In this #OwnVoices LGBTQ young adult debut, Alex comes to realize his true identity as a young woman named Sasha Masha.
Three years ago, Ash’s mom, Kristin, left home and never came back. 
Carey Parker dreams of being a diva, and bringing the house down with song. They can hit every note of all the top pop and Broadway hits. But despite their talent, emotional scars from an incident with a homophobic classmate and their grandmother’s spiraling dementia make it harder and harder for Carey to find their voice.
Noah Ramirez thinks he’s an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem—all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.
Two boys are starting at a new school.
Jeremy Harkiss, cheer captain and student body president, won’t let coming out as a transgender boy ruin his senior year. Instead of bowing to the bigots and outdate school administration, Jeremy decides to make some noise—and how better than by challenging his all-star ex-boyfriend, Lukas for the title of Homecoming King?
The year is 20__, and Penfield R. Henderson is in a rut. When he’s not walking dogs for cash or responding to booty calls from his B-list celebrity hookup, he’s holed up in his dingy Bushwick apartment obsessing over holograms of Aiden Chase, a fellow trans man and influencer documenting his much smoother transition into picture-perfect masculinity on the Gram. After an IRL encounter with Aiden leaves Pen feeling especially resentful, Pen enlists his roommates, the Witch and the Stoner-Hacker, to put their respective talents to use in hexing Aiden. Together, they gain access to Aiden’s social media account and post a picture of Pen’s aloe plant, Alice, tied to a curse:
When Liam Cooper’s older brother Ethan is killed in a hit-and-run, Liam has to not only learn to face the world without one of the people he loved the most, but also face the fading relationship with his two best friends.
Wyatt would give anything to forget where he came from—but a kingdom demands its king.
Fifteen-year-old Spencer Harris is a proud nerd, an awesome big brother, and a David Beckham in training. He’s also transgender. After transitioning at his old school leads to a year of isolation and bullying, Spencer gets a fresh start at Oakley, the most liberal private school in Ohio.
Vaseline on the teeth makes a smile shine. It’s a cheap stunt, but Mark Adams knows it’s optics that can win or ruin an election.
Ash is no stranger to feeling like an outcast. For someone who cycles through genders, it’s a daily struggle to feel in control of how people perceive you. Some days Ash is undoubtedly girl, but other times, 100 percent guy. Daniel lacks control too—of his emotions. He’s been told he’s overly sensitive more times than he can count. He can’t help the way he is, and he sure wishes someone would accept him for it.
Dani’s best friend, Sarah, is a ghost. But maybe that’s normal when you’ve spent your childhood running from an abusive parent.
Krys Malcolm Belc’s visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood—conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding his son Samson—eventually clarified his gender identity.
Second chances take many forms…
Annie is a smart, antisocial lesbian starting her senior year of high school who’s under pressure to join the cheerleader squad to make friends and round out her college applications. Her former friend BeeBee is a people-pleaser—a trans girl who must keep her parents happy with her grades and social life to keep their support of her transition. Through the rigors of squad training and amped up social pressures (not to mention micro aggressions and other queer youth problems), the two girls rekindle a friendship they thought they’d lost and discover there may be other, sweeter feelings springing up between them.
There are just two things keeping Finch Kelly from a full-blown case of high-school senioritis: a) the agony of waiting to learn whether he’s gotten off the deferral list to Georgetown, the school of his nerdy political dreams; and b) the prospect of taking home the gold at Nationals, the culmination of his four-year unbroken debate team winning streak. With his own unmatched expertise, and with the charming, silver-tongued Jonah Cabrera as his partner and #1 fan, Finch is nearly invincible — until a devastating second-place finish at the State Championship sends him reeling into self-doubt. 
April French doesn’t do relationships and she never asks for more.
Aspiring actor August Greene just landed a coveted spot at the prestigious School of Performing Arts in New York. There’s only one problem: His conservative parents won’t accept that he’s transgender. And to stay with his aunt in the city, August must promise them he won’t transition.
Obie knew his transition would have ripple effects. He has to leave his swim coach, his pool, and his best friends. But it’s time for Obie to find where he truly belongs.
Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six.
Syd (no pronouns, please) has always dealt with big, hard-to-talk-about things by baking. Being dumped is no different, except now Syd is baking at the Proud Muffin, a queer bakery and community space in Austin. And everyone who eats Syd’s breakup brownies . . . breaks up. Even Vin and Alec, who own the Proud Muffin. And their breakup might take the bakery down with it. Being dumped is one thing; causing ripples of queer heartbreak through the community is another. But the cute bike delivery person, Harley (he or they, check the pronoun pin, it’s probably on the messenger bag), believes Syd about the magic baking. And Harley believes Syd’s magical baking can fix things, too—one recipe at a time.
Bywater Books is a respected lesbian press founded in 2004 that boasts among its award-winning roster of writers Cheryl Head, Ann McMan, Paula Martinac, Penny Micklebury and many more. In 2018, the Bywater’s leadership, publisher Salem West and director of operations, Marianne K. Martin, decided they wanted to start a new imprint that would expand their reach behind the lesbian community to other queer writers, and especially writers of color. They named the imprint Amble Press and their first acquisition was Alan E. Rose’s novel 
I was tapped as Amble’s managing editor last spring because of my interest in giving back to the queer literary community the same boost I had received when I was a young, emerging writer. Part of the agreement was that Amble would publish the next Henry Rios novel, Lies With Man, which appears in April. My first acquisitions will be published in the summer of 2021; Matthew Clark Davison’s debut novel Doubting Thomas in June, 2021 and Joe Okonkwo’s collection of short stories, Kiss the Scar on the Back of My Neck in August.
On October 2nd, 1977, Glenn Burke, outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, made history without even swinging a bat. When his teammate Dusty Baker hit a historic home run, Glenn enthusiastically congratulated him with the first ever high five.
Andrew Maraniss is a New York Times-bestselling author of narrative nonfiction. His latest book, SINGLED OUT, is a biography of Glenn Burke, the first openly gay Major League Baseball player.