Today on the site we’re doing a dive into Night of the Living Queers, an all-queer Horror anthology edited by Alex Brown and Shelly Page and releasing August 29th from Wednesday Books! Not only is this collection super queer, but the lineup is entirely comprised of authors of color, providing fresh perspectives for an anthology that is not to be missed! Here’s the official description:
Night of the Living Queers is a YA horror anthology that explores a night when anything is possible, exclusively featuring queer authors of color putting fresh spins on classic horror tropes and tales.
No matter its name or occasion, Halloween is more than a Hallmark holiday, it’s a symbol of transformation. NIGHT OF THE LIVING QUEERS is a YA horror anthology that explores how Halloween can be more than just candies and frights, but a night where anything is possible. Each short story is told through the lens of a different BIPOC teen and the Halloween night that changes their lives forever. Creative, creepy, and queer, this collection brings fresh terror, heart, and humor to young adult literature.
Contributors include editors Alex Brown and Shelly Page, Kalynn Bayron, Ryan Douglass, Sara Farizan, Maya Gittelman, Kosoko Jackson, Em Liu, Vanessa Montalban, Ayida Shonibar, Tara Sim, Trang Thanh Tran, and Rebecca Kim Wells.
And here’s a little more on some of the stories, from the authors themselves!
Sara Farizan, A Brief Intermission
A Brief Intermission is about two cinephile employees at a drive-in movie theater who have to work overtime on Halloween and play a movie for some ghostly guests. I’ve long been interested in the history of drive-ins in the U.S. as well as Chevy Bel-Air cars and thought this would be a good vehicle for those interests. Get it? Vehicle? Anyway, if you like cinema, jokes, ghouls, and fear conformity, you might get a kick out of this story.
Rebecca Wells, Guested
I’m a big scaredy-cat, so I began my short story by brainstorming all the horror tropes that frighten me. The answer of course is all of them, but one I found myself circling back to was the idea that someone in my life (possibly myself!) could be possessed. Mindswaps, multiverses where people come back “wrong,” possession by demons or parasites or even other people – it’s all scary. Add on to that the idea that I might know what’s wrong but not be able to convince anyone of the truth? Downright horrifying. But the scariest part (to my main character, anyway) is that most of the characters in my story want to be possessed. Just not in the wrong way…
Kosoko Jackson, Rocky Road with Caramel Drizzle
My story, Rocky Road with Caramel Drizzle, was inspired by the idea of killing your gays. So many stories only focus on queer pain and how queers need to ‘rise above’ their attackers, to become a better person and grow from it. While that may be a valid route for some, people, all people, deserve to use their rage and process their pain how they see fit. And sometimes, that’s through punishment. I wanted to write something with magic, darkness, validity and romance, to show queer kids sad events don’t mean sad lives, and that whatever path you take, when hurt, is okay and valid. I also love crossroad demons and wanted to write a queer twist on that.
Ayida Shonibar, Save Me from Myself
Save Me from Myself is about a teen’s dread made manifest—the character’s, and my own. It’s a tragedy. And a love story. Horror as a genre resonates for me in how it justifies a current of fear permeating the narrative. Existing alongside frequent intrusive worries, especially ones rooted in environments that raised you, means some are bound to come true. An inner fear materialising into reality can feel like “proof” that you should continue carrying all the fears with you and can send you into bone-chilling panic over missed opportunities to prevent it. It feels like your worst thoughts, intangible yet large and powerful, control your world more than you do—a sort of cosmic horror. This is why stories like Kafka’s “Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis” really spoke to me growing up. You might think you’re impossible to love—that if, miraculously, somebody does make the mistake of loving you, it can’t be real, or it’ll be lost, or you’re not worth the sacrifice it takes. That loving you is the missed opportunity. I tried to encompass this cold terror in the ending—the abject, abrupt devastation I struggled to make sense of as a teenager in the face of misfortune. But deeply uncomfortable fears and worthiness of love can coexist. They’re not mutually exclusive. When things go horribly wrong, you can, and should, still be loved. I hope the ending leaves the reader with a belief in love that remains unshakeably true and deserved, even despite the ugliest of outcomes that can’t always be controlled.
Shelly Page, Anna
My story, Anna, is about a teen who must save the kids she’s babysitting from a ghost. I knew I wanted to write something along the lines of Halloween and Ouijia, but with a twist. My story explores themes of abandonment, loneliness, and, of course, fear. I wanted to show readers that the past doesn’t have to dictate your future, and that giving into fear ensures you stay trapped. I hope my story connects with teen readers who feel afraid to take a chance or make a change. If you can find the courage to overcome your fear, even if it takes a helping hand, it can mean true happiness.
Maya Gittelman, Leyla Mendoza and the Last House on the Lane
The texture of my story is written with deep love for the Philippines, and the communities of Philippine diaspora Leyla and I belong to. Fraught love tangled in tension and grief, but love at the core of it, love as the force of it, love learning how best to grow. Love inextricable, woven tight into the dissonance.
The plot of Leyla Mendoza emerged out of two concepts. First, the Western fear of aging and the elderly—I wanted to respond to the fairytale and horror trope of “there’s someone old and alone, and that means we as a community deserve to judge them.” And secondly, I wanted to use that response as a vessel to explore other experiences of non-belonging. The core of this story came together as: what does it mean to imagine a possible trans future for yourself when you have no real-life examples of it? What might it mean to imagine a transmasc future when you don’t have a role model for the kind of man you want to be, a future in which your femininity belongs to you without needing to align with anyone else’s? I wanted to breathe magic into the fact that for many trans people, even though we might have to build that future for ourselves, it’s possible and it’s necessary and it’s more beautiful that you can imagine. And—you are not alone.
Alex Brown, The Three Phases of Ghost-Hunting
The Three Phases of Ghost Hunting is about two best friends (who want to be more than just friends) who are spending their Halloween night in a mall food court as they search for the truth behind an infamous local legend: Terrifying Bob, the (alleged) pizza-stealing ghost of a pirate who died a few centuries ago. What starts out as a light-hearted investigation turns into an adventure that brings them face-to-face with an entity that’s way more powerful than a ghost.
This story is my ode to every paranormal believer and skeptic pairing out there! I wanted to pay homage to one of my favorite trope-y pairs in a fun (and vaguely existentially terrifying way). Daisy and Iris are both queer Asian Americans, like me, and I was delighted and honored to bring them to life (and get them together at the end)!
It’s book week at school, and nonbinary fourth grader Riley and their best friends craft hard for the Dress Like Your Favorite Character Day. Colorful fabric! Paint! Glitter! They are ready to make the biggest and best group costume ever! But most of the other kids are having trouble coming up with costumes. Riley is ready to use their creativity and vision to help as many kids as possible so dress-up day will be a big success!
Books are Rosie Taft’s life. And ever since she took over her mother’s beloved Manhattan bookstore, they’ve become her home too. The only thing missing is her own real-life romance like the ones she loves to read about, and Rosie has an idea of who she might like to sweep her off her feet. She’s struck up a flirty online friendship with lesbian romance author Brie, and what could be more romantic than falling in love with her favorite author?
Dark tourism—visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others—takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena’s stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet. The 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father’s stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka—the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner—to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors. A fraught memory of her time as a young art student in Chicago that is uneasily foundational to her bisexual, queer identity today. The ways that life-changing impairments following a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth.
Eighteen-year-olds Ruben Montez and Zach Knight are two members of the boy-band Saturday, one of the biggest acts in America. Along with their bandmates, Angel Phan and Jon Braxton, the four are teen heartbreakers in front of the cameras and best friends backstage. But privately, cracks are starting to form: their once-easy rapport is straining under the pressures of fame, and Ruben confides in Zach that he’s feeling smothered by management’s pressure to stay in the closet.
Elise Beaumont is cursed. With every touch, she experiences exactly how her loved ones will die. And after her brother’s death—a death she predicted but was unable to prevent—Elise is desperate to get rid of her terrible gift, no matter the cost.
Renu Amin always seemed perfect: doting husband, beautiful house, healthy sons. But as the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death approaches, Renu is binge-watching soap operas and simmering with old resentments. She can’t stop wondering if, thirty-five years ago, she chose the wrong life. In Los Angeles, her son, Akash, has everything he ever wanted, but as he tries to kickstart his songwriting career and commit to his boyfriend, he is haunted by the painful memories he fled a decade ago. When his mother tells him she is selling the family home, Akash returns to Illinois, hoping to finally say goodbye and move on.
Join fifteen bestselling, award-winning, and up-and-coming authors as they reimagine some of the most popular tropes in the romance genre. 
Tair has never known what it means to belong. Abandoned at a young age and raised in the all-Elven valley of Mirte, the young Human defines herself by isolation, confined to her small, seemingly trustworthy family.
No straight women. No parents of students. Nobody under thirty-five. Vanessa Martini makes no apologies for her dating checklist. She’s been up close to enough messy breakups to know what havoc they wreak in life. Just because people see her as fun and happy, and just because she loves her life in general, that doesn’t mean she can’t be careful. Or discerning. Or, okay, fine, super picky.
It’s Karnawa season in the snow-cloaked Kingdom of Lechia, and from now until midnight when the church bells ring an end to Devil’s Tuesday time will be marked with wintry balls and glittery disguises, cavalcades of nightly torch-lit “kuligi” sleigh-parties.
As executive chef at one of the hottest restaurants in DC, DeShawn Franklin has almost everything he’s ever wanted. He’s well-known, his restaurant is Michelin starred and he can write his own ticket anywhere he wants. Until his grandmother calls him home and drops two bombshells:
Ben has spent his first year of college working on his fantasy manuscript with his writing partner Mario, who is a great Spanish tutor, and an even better kisser. So why can’t he stop thinking about the fact that Arthur’s back in town two years after they called it quits?
Coming out is easier when you’ve got someone by your side. At least that’s how the hyper-private Quinn Kincaid sees it. When her publicist suggests a good old-fashioned sham of a Hollywood relationship, Quinn reluctantly agrees. And that’s how the star of Jordan’s Appeal, TV’s highest rated legal drama, ends up with a fake girlfriend – the very real, very sexy and very gay soap star, Lacey Matthews.
Ryann Bird dreams of traveling across the stars. But a career in space isn’t an option for a girl who lives in a trailer park on the wrong side of town. So Ryann becomes her circumstances and settles for acting out and skipping school to hang out with her delinquent friends.
All Pen wants is to be the kind of girl she’s always been. So why does everyone have a problem with it? They think the way she looks and acts means she’s trying to be a boy—that she should quit trying to be something she’s not. If she dresses like a girl, and does what her folks want, it will show respect. If she takes orders and does what her friend Colby wants, it will show her loyalty. But respect and loyalty, Pen discovers, are empty words. Old-world parents, disintegrating friendships, and strong feelings for other girls drive Pen to see the truth–that in order to be who she truly wants to be, she’ll have to man up.
In 1955, eighteen-year-old Janet Jones keeps the love she shares with her best friend Marie a secret. It’s not easy being gay in Washington, DC, in the age of McCarthyism, but when she discovers a series of books about women falling in love with other women, it awakens something in Janet. As she juggles a romance she must keep hidden and a newfound ambition to write and publish her own story, she risks exposing herself—and Marie—to a danger all too real.
You go through life thinking there’s so much you need…
Brynn Haper’s life has one steadying force–Rachel Maddow.
When You Want It All, You’ve Got To Give It AllFrom the outside, Bliss Sinclair’s life seems very glamorous–a high-profile job with a publishing house, a fashionable boyfriend who looks good on her arm, and ultra-chic parties where the come-ons are as hot and thrilling at night as they are empty as an air-kiss greeting the next day. It’s a world Bliss wanders through with blinders on, all the while craving more. And she finds it in the most unlikely of places.
Small-batch independent yarn dyer Clara Ziegler is eager to brainstorm new color combinations–if only she could come up with ideas she likes as much as last time! When she sees Danielle Solomon’s paintings of Florida wildlife by chance at a neighborhood gallery, she finds her source of inspiration. Outspoken, passionate, and complicated, Danielle herself soon proves even more captivating than her artwork…
Danny Tozer has a problem: she just inherited the powers of Dreadnought, the world’s greatest superhero.
Josh Chester loves being a Hollywood bad boy, coasting on his good looks, his parties, his parents’ wealth, and the occasional modeling gig. But his laid-back lifestyle is about to change. To help out his best friend, Liam, he joins his hit teen TV show, Daylight Falls … opposite Vanessa Park, the one actor immune to his charms. (Not that he’s trying to charm her, of course.) Meanwhile, his drama-queen mother blackmails him into a new family reality TV show, with Josh in the starring role. Now that he’s in the spotlight—on everyone’s terms but his own—Josh has to decide whether a life as a superstar is the one he really wants.
Kyle Blake likes plans. So far, they’re pretty simple: Finish her senior year of high school, head off to a good college, find a cute boyfriend, graduate, get a good job, get married, the whole heterosexual shebang. Nothing is going to stand in the way of that plan. Not even Stella Lewis.
If you don’t get lost, there’s a chance you may never be found. Jenna McGovern has spent her whole life training for the stage. She’s taken dance classes, voice lessons, and even earned her performance degree from one of the most prestigious musical theater programs in the nation. At graduation, she’s stunned when a chance audition lands her a prime supporting role in the hottest Broadway touring production in the country. In more exciting news, Jenna discovers acclaimed television star Adrienne Kenyon is headlining the production.
Seventeen-year-old Rukhsana Ali tries her hardest to live up to her conservative Muslim parents’ expectations, but lately she’s finding that harder and harder to do. She rolls her eyes instead of screaming when they blatantly favor her brother and she dresses conservatively at home, saving her crop tops and makeup for parties her parents don’t know about. Luckily, only a few more months stand between her carefully monitored life in Seattle and her new life at Caltech, where she can pursue her dream of becoming an engineer.
Susanne Wolff isn’t thrilled when her mother sends her all the way across the country to Freiburg to save her uncle’s stationery store from bankruptcy. Freiburg is too provincial for her taste, and besides, pen and paper are outdated anyway.
Hal Orion is an accomplished chef and food truck owner. She loves her life, her longtime sous chef and best friend, and the food she shares with the residents of her beloved city of Buffalo. Her life is exactly how she wants it: no strings, no commitments, and no roots—just great grilled cheese and a whole lot of freedom on the side.
Seventeen-year-old Bex is thrilled when she gets an internship on her favorite tv show, Silver Falls. Unfortunately, the internship isn’t quite what she expected… instead of sitting in a crowded writer’s room volleying ideas back and forth, Production Interns are stuck picking up the coffee.
Hannah’s a witch, but not the kind you’re thinking of. She’s the real deal, an Elemental with the power to control fire, earth, water, and air. But even though she lives in Salem, Massachusetts, her magic is a secret she has to keep to herself. If she’s ever caught using it in front of a Reg (read: non-witch), she could lose it. For good. So, Hannah spends most of her time avoiding her ex-girlfriend (and fellow Elemental Witch) Veronica, hanging out with her best friend, and working at the Fly by Night Cauldron selling candles and crystals to tourists, goths, and local Wiccans.
In Samsboro, Kentucky, Kalyn Spence’s name is inseparable from the brutal murder her father committed when he was a teenager. Forced to return to town, Kalyn must attend school under a pseudonym . . . or face the lingering anger of Samsboro’s citizens, who refuse to forget the crime.
One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates—picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose—and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them. 
Pretty Little Liars meets People Like Us in this taut, tense thriller about two teens who find their lives intertwined when an anonymous texter threatens to spill their secrets and uproot their lives.
Sana Khan is a cheerleader and a straight A student. She’s the classic (somewhat obnoxious) overachiever determined to win.
Billy Sloat and Lydia Lemon don’t have much in common, unless you count growing up on the same (wrong) side of the tracks, the lack of a mother, and a persistent loneliness that has inspired creative coping mechanisms.
The Emperor needs necromancers.
Being invited to be a part of those anthologies was a blessing and I’m so grateful to have been asked. They really helped me out of a slump when I felt like I couldn’t write anything or I was too bogged down with my novel. All of the editors, Jessica Spotswood, Saundra Mitchell, and Lamar Giles were all incredibly helpful and I was very happy that they thought of me.
I didn’t really have any idea what I was getting into and I still have a lot to learn. I think I was naïve, but that was sometimes a good thing because I just wrote what was in my heart. I am hopeful and encouraged by all the new books and voices we are seeing, especially from own voices authors who can speak to queer experiences. Could there be room for more? Absolutely. I think we’ve seen LGBTQA books get more support, but that doesn’t mean okay well that’s enough. You’ve had your moment.
I constantly worry that people may think the one perspective I have in my work is the only perspective because they may not have read other narratives about the characters I write about. I also worry that the characters I do write about who represent real people don’t feel that I am doing it the right way. There is a lot of pressure to represent an under represented group well and to make sure you are doing things perfectly when there is no way to be perfect. My hope is that more own voices books make their way into the world so that people are not always given three dimensional depictions can have some depth, as well as having different perspectives from characters of similar background.
What can you share about whatever you’re working on now? And do we have any chance at getting a queer-girl basketball player someday? Asking for a friend. Of yours. Who is me 😉
Sara Farizan, the daughter of Iranian immigrants, was born in Massachusetts. She is an MFA graduate of Lesley University and holds a BA in film and media studies from American University. Sara grew up feeling different in her private high school, not only because of her ethnicity, but also because of her liking girls romantically, her lack of excitement in science and math, and her love of writing plays and short stories. So she came out of the closet in college, realized math and science weren’t so bad (but were not for her), and decided she wanted to be a writer. Sara has been a Hollywood intern, a waitress, a comic book/record store employee, an art magazine blogger, a marketing temp, and an after-school teacher, but above all else she has always been a writer. Sara lives near Boston, loves Kurosawa films, eighties R&B, and graphic novels, and thinks all kids are awesome. She is the acclaimed author of If You Could Be Mine, Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel, and Here to Stay.
Take a journey through time and genres and discover a past where queer figures live, love and shape the world around them. Seventeen of the best young adult authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens.
