In honor of Pride month (well, actually, Overdrive selected it for me because it was available, and, fortuitously, it fits the theme!), I picked up Night of the Living Queers, edited by Shelly Page and Alex Brown. This YA short story collection, which is unfortunately named, in my opinion, was terrific. As with any short story collection, there were a few stories that didn’t work so well for me, but as a collection, writing quality was uniformly high, the variety was delicious in terms of creepy crawlies, depictions of queerness, diversity of characters and setting – taken together, really a great potpourri that is sure to have something (and likely many somethings) to appeal to any horror fan and there is plenty of materiality of the life of teenagers, romance, adventure, and so on, to appeal to readers who may not identify as such.
Most of the stories take place during a Halloween with a blue moon, which sometimes features strongly (Anna by Shelly Page) and sometimes simply provides a backdrop. Unsurprisingly, the greatest horror tends to be what humans do to other humans. In Rocky Road with Caramel Drizzle by Kosoko Jackson, for example, the protagonist, Julian, is beaten nearly to death by classmates in a homophobic attack. He loses ‘safety in [his] own skin,’ and his story charts the brutal path he takes to get it back. In Leyla Mendoza and the Last House on the Lane by Maya Gittelman, Leyla struggles to conform with his mother’s wishes for him, constantly battling with ‘Not [being] girl enough to feel at home in this body.’
The stories are also very much about the horrors of growing up and figuring out who you are. Many of the protagonists are explicitly teenagers of color, navigating a world that doesn’t see them as beautiful or necessary, many seizing their own space in the world and learning as they face the horror in the story. Don’t worry, even as big issues of identity, intersectionality, and place are examined in many of the stories, at their heart, this collection is fun and not pedantic. There are terrifying stories (for me, at least – I am very weeny), like in the Ring-like Nine Stops by Trang Thanh Tran, and hilarious stories, like that of the eldritch horror living in the mall food court in The Three Phases of Ghost Hunting by Alex Brown. Teenage queerness, naturally, is a cornerstone of all the stories, and the breadth of experiences – positive, negative, romantic, grisly, confusing, clear as day, central to the story, just a characteristic, etc. – is beautifully rendered by the different authors. I would imagine most queer teenagers could find something of themselves in this collection. I also think we all can see something of ourselves in these young people battling metaphorical and actual demons.
It also covers a gamut of horror constructs: demons (sometime scary, sometimes hot), ghosts, poltergeists, clowns (shudder!), and other things that go bump in the night. Stories take place at parties, when babysitting, on the subway, in the swamps. Halloween allows some kids, like Mona in Ayida Shonibar’s Save Me from Myself to be someone she isn’t. It also heightens to social risks of being a teenager, as parties force many of the protagonists to figure out how to navigate the fraught milieu (hilariously in Hey There Demons by Tara Sim, crushingly in Welcome to the Hotel Paranoia by Vanessa Montalban).
I highly recommend this collection of stories. Ignore the twee title if it bugs you and dive in!