Keep the lights on: These LGBTQ+ horror books leave a fright.

LGBTQ+ horror books shake up the genre with new ideas and approaches to the classic medium. In these books, daring writers bring the queer experience to the world of horror with unique terrors and monsters. The relationship between gay fiction and horror dates back to Gothic novels of the late 1700s and 1800s.

Early works with gay subtexts, like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), explore themes of gender dysphoria and same-sex desire. And Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) cleverly disguises gay attraction as aesthetic admiration. Inventors of the queer horror subgenre coded their stories in ways the LGBTQ+ community could safely see them and non-members could not.

However, today LGBTQ+ horror novels are one of the most popular subgenres. As queerness has become accepted in wide stream media, horror has been at the forefront of representation across mediums like film and literary fiction. Fear is different for everyone, and the voices of gay and trans horror writers and characters help bring light to unique terrors and ways of exploring them. From lesbian vampire romances and bisexual alien abductions to gay AF ghost hauntings, there is a plethora of queer horror for everyone's taste.

If you’re a fan of this enthralling sub-genre, here are some terrifyingly good stories to start with:

• Modern LGBTQ+ horror authors revolutionizing the genre
• LGBTQ+ horror short stories you can read online now, for free
• New queer horror movies to get excited about

And if those don’t satisfy your appetite, check out the stories below to dive deeper into the queer world of horror.