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💜 Queer Fairytale Retellings

🌙 Good afternoon, my beloved bookish bats. For many of us, fairytales were our first introduction to the fantasy & romantasy genres. Here are a few queer fairytale retellings filled with magic, mischief, & mayhem that are bound to enchant your heart.

✨ The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller 🌙 The Nightmare Verse Series - LL McKinney ✨ Icarus - K. Ancrum 🌙 A Clash of Steel - CB Lee ✨ Cinderella is Dead - Kalynn Bayron 🌙 The Fox Maidens - Robin Ha ✨ Briar Girls - Rebecca Kim Wells 🌙 Beast - Brie Spangler ✨ Malice - Heather Walter

🌙 The Witch and the Vampire - Francesca Flores ✨ Gwen & Art Are Not in Love - Lex Croucher 🌙 The Magic Fix - Trung Le Nguyen ✨ Not Good for Maidens - Tori Bovalino 🌙 Relit - Various ✨ Tink and Wendy - Kelly Ann Jacobso 🌙 Hunting Monsters - S.L. Huang ✨ Burning Roses - S.L. Huang 🌙 Caged Bird Rising - Nino Delia

✨ Summer in the City of Roses - Michelle Ruiz Keil 🌙 A Lake of Feathers and Moonbeams - Dax Murray ✨ Girl, Serpent, Thorn - Melissa Bashardoust 🌙 Winterglass - Benjanun Sriduangkaew ✨ Robber Girl - S.T. Gibson 🌙 Ash - Malinda Lo ✨ Sword In The Stars - Amy Rose Capetta & Cori McCarthy 🌙 Darling - K. Ancrum ✨ Girls Made of Snow and Glass - Melissa Bashardoust

🌙 Dark And Deepest Red - Anna-Marie McLemore ✨ Ghost Wood Song - Erica Waters 🌙 His Hideous Heart - Various ✨ The Bone Spindle - Leslie Vedder 🌙 Legendborn By Tracey Deonn ✨ The Midnight Girls - Alicia Jasinska 🌙 Iron Widow - Xiran Jay Zhao ✨ The Mercies - Kiran Millwood Hargrave 🌙 She Who Became the Sun - Shelley Parker-Chan

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She's Always Hungry: Stories by Eliza Clark

Release date: 12 November 2024

Genre: adult horror/weird fiction short story collection

Synopsis

Moving from California to Newcastle, from Frontier-era America to an unexplored planet in the near future, from a pub down the road to an incel-occupied office IT department, She’s Always Hungry revels in every aspect of being human.

Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark's debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.

Review

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC!

These stories range from straightforward to weird to weirder.

Usually, I find that short story collections will inevitably have a few duds, but I enjoyed everything in this collection.

A lot of these stories are written in a darkly humorous tone, which threw me off initially, but it really grew on me. I love the contrast between the tone and the contents of the stories.

My favourites were the scifi horror stories Hollow Bones and Extinction Event. After reading these I went to double check if the author had written any full length scifi books because these were soo good. Like, these aren't groundbreaking, but the author introduces them in a way that makes it easy to quickly grasp, and she creates an atmosphere that is truly chilling.

I have to mention Shake Well, which legit gave me the creeps. It's like sort of mundane and also sort of horrifying, with the body horror in this being the most unnerving to me from this collection, possibly because it hits a little closer to home.

I am also obsessed with The King, which is an absurd genderbent incel power fantasy. I think people might hate this story, but the absurdity of it, plus the writing style, was so ridiculously entertaining. I also liked the cannibalism and gore.

There's a content guide at the back of my eARC, which is much appreciated, as some of these stories can be quite dark/gory, and the content guide covers the necessary warnings in detail.

Overall, the writing is engaging and accessible, and there's something for everyone. I will definitely check out the author's other works.

Content Guide

These are screenshots from the content guide, which covers the content warnings for each story in depth.

Some of them are spoilery, but if you need to be warnings for certain topics, especially for body image issues, eating disorders, sexual assault, or gore/body horror, I would advise checking the guide.

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She sat in a classroom full of her contemporaries, looking like everything was the same as usual, but inside she was standing in a forest screaming until her heart burst.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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No one can really explain, either before or after, what makes a teenager stop wanting to be alive. It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?”

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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Just before the bank robber came in she had been busy refreshing her browser to find out if two famous actors were going to get divorced or not. She hoped they were, because sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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He sometimes thinks it’s impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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Jim was born in a generation that regarded computers as magic, Jack in one that has always taken them for granted. When Jim was young, children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: “I can see you’re hurting.”

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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Obviously none of this has anything to do with you. Well, maybe just a little. Because presumably you’re a normal, decent person.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning.

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman

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We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.”

"Anxious People" Fredrik Backman