Queer fall reading suggestions for your pumpkin spice life

Ahh Homoween, the Qweer Christmas that lets the girls, gays, and theys let their freak flag fly. But not every monster wears fangs. As the air cools and the days start shrinking, there’s something delicious about sinking into stories that ask us to look closer at what’s hiding under the surface. So we've compiled a list of books that bruise and heal in equal measure, where love and monstrosity blur, and tenderness is never entirely safe. They’re not cozy, exactly, but they’ll keep you warm — the kind of warmth that comes from recognition, from seeing yourself on the page and realizing, for better or worse, you’ve been haunted all along.

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This month, our Gay Writes pick dives headfirst into the grotesque with Alison Rumfitt’s feral second novel, Brainwyrms! In a near-future Britain on the verge of fascism (so, Tuesday), a ban against transness has just been announced. Frankie, a young trans woman, is reeling from the trauma of surviving a terrorist bombing at the gender identity clinic where she worked when, at a fetish club, she meets Vanya. The enigmatic online influencer's words infect as much as they inspire, and something cracks open in Frankie. What begins as a spark becomes a full-body possession. But Vanya is hiding more than just extreme kinks, and their love is curdling into something rotten, impossible to untangle from the world around them, where politics and parasites feed off of each other in equal measure.

The novel is a sickening lurch through the psychedelic landscapes of hatred, drawing parallels between -philias and -phobias and the ways in which desire / disgust may be two sides of the same obsessive coin. Rumfitt uses body horror as a seething social prophecy of real-world terrors — grotesque, horny, and furious, Brainwyrms is not for the faint of heart. But this revolting study of ideological parasites is one you can't look away from, even as it eats you alive. Because the worms are already inside you. Content warnings for truly everything you could possibly think of, so tread with care.

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My Favourite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1 is a sprawling graphic novel set in late 1960s Chicago. It unfolds through the spiral notebook of ten-year-old Karen Reyes, who sketches herself as a werewolf detective investigating the mysterious death of her upstairs neighbor, a Holocaust survivor found shot in her bed. Karen's search pulls her deep into the woman's past and the underbelly of Chicago itself — from shadowed archives and tape recordings to neighbourhoods full of ghosts — as she pieces together a story far darker and more entangled than she ever expected. What begins as a murder mystery unravels into a labyrinth of personal and historical wounds that refuse to stay buried.

Part noir, part diary, part museum of the human grotesque, Ferris' art is the book’s beating heart, with entire pages drawn in cross-hatched Bic pen, coloured only in scraps of tone, so that shadows and lines hold as much narrative weight as dialogue. She draws a world where the monstrous is never simply evil, where queerness becomes both mask and mirror. What emerges is a gothic portrait of becoming, where every monster brings Karen closer to the parts of herself that the world taught her to fear.

To conquer fear, you must become fear itself.

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Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays is a gleefully deranged entry in the queer horror-camp canon. It follows Misha Byrne, a closeted TV writer whose hit monster-of-the-week series is facing network “notes” — tone down the Gay Stuff™, kill the lesbians, make it palatable. When he refuses, the monsters he created start tearing their way out of the script and into real life, giving him five days to fix the ending before they finish the rewrite themselves. With bodies piling up, Misha is not just running from a killer, but the machinery of storytelling itself that’s always buried people like him.

Tingle turns this premise into something far sharper than parody. Beneath the gore and absurdity is a furious critique of the industry’s appetite for queer suffering, and a surprisingly tender story about autonomy. The novel is at once a splatter-fest and a manifesto, a love letter to the storytellers who refuse to kill their darlings and keep writing themselves back to life.

Beneath the chaos is a simple, furious question: why do we still have to die to be seen?

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Get in loser, we're going driving! Initially published in 2001, Tramps Like Us is an autofictional odyssey that captures the rapidly changing queer landscape of the mid 70s and 80s through the eyes of Joe, a teenager suffocating in his abusive Kansas City upbringing. Joe bolts the moment he finishes high school, hitchhiking his way out of monotony and reuniting with Ali, his hometown's only other queer outcast — the Thelma to his Louise. They tumble from Miami to New Orleans, finding communities of misfits to call their own on the roads in between. Days blur into a tide of sex, drugs, and music, before discovering a true paradise of queer hedonism when they finally wash up in San Francisco. But with it comes the cascading horror of AIDS, leaving Joe standing in the wreckage of a joy that once felt infallible.

Westmoreland's voice is blunt and unflinching, tracing a generation that lived hard and loved harder. It's a tribute to found family — the lovers, the drifters, the friends who held each other through delirium and grief. And through all the chaos is our unspoken hunger for belonging. As Eileen Myles writes, "I love this book most of all because it is so mortal."

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Chloe Michelle Howarth's Sunburn is set in a small Irish village in the early 1990s, where the future feels fixed before it begins. Lucy has always lived by expectations — marry the boy next door, stay close to home, never ask too many questions. But during one sweltering summer, she begins to glimpse who she really is through Susannah, a childhood friend who's returned from boarding school. Their spark quickly deepens into a secret, all-consuming love that's both sanctuary and suffocation, impossible to sustain, forcing an impending choice between a safe life and a true one. Lucy must reckon with what she’s willing to lose, and whether she can ever make peace with the ache of first love's ghost.

Howarth writes with quiet precision, capturing the heat of desire and the weight of repression in equal measure. As Lucy’s world closes in, she learns how shame can hollow a life and how some flames never go out, no matter how far you run. Sunburn may burn slowly, but it's a tender, devastating debut about queer longing, faith, and the rural claustrophobia that shape who we dare to become.

Because the same longing that frees you can just as easily unmake you.

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You can read last fall's reco's here and look forward to more reading reco's this winter.

If you live in Toronto, here are some very queer friendly book shops we recommend:

- Another Story Bookshop
- A Different Booklist
- Little Ghost Books
- Glad Day Bookshop