Extra Credit
A brief and very incomplete guide to trans horror
Working on Apocalypse 1999 has been incredibly fun, in part because it’s allowed me to revisit the horror stories I’ve loved. It’s important to me that the people who read it also know something about those stories, and in particular that you don’t go away thinking trans horror is something new. This genre has always been deeply queer. I also want you to have a list of trans authors and artists to support. When gender-marginalized creators succeed, the publishing and entertainment industries start to cultivate new voices that they might have previously dismissed as “unmarketable.” Anyone’s success is to everyone’s benefit.
My last non-fiction book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, came with a resource guide in the back, listing all the books and movies I thought were relevant to each chapter. I thought of doing the same with Apocalypse 1999, but I figured you would be better served by a blog post — the genre is growing rapidly, and a blog post can be updated as new things come out. There’s no way I can comprehend the entire field in one go, but I can at least share some of my reading list.
So: If you liked Apocalypse 1999, here are some other books you might enjoy. If you didn’t like Apocalypse 1999, these are probably better. You win either way, don’t you?
Comics
Jed the Undead: Fire in the Hole, Andi Santagata
Santagata uses his demons and ghosts primarily as springboards for comedy — American Spirits, a brief web series about stoned freelance ghostbusters, will be of interest to anyone who likes Apocalypse, or jokes — but in Jed the Undead, the saga of a demon boy struggling to adjust to mortal high school in Nevada, he also digs into teen sexual awkwardness with great zeal. I had not really planned to think about the inconveniences of demonic puberty, but Santagata has, and the result is a comic that contains the indelible phrase “jizz arsonist.” Full graphic novel forthcoming.
Not Drunk Enough, Tess Stone
Trans body horror is a pretty rich vein, and this story — in which a delivery guy is locked into a lab overnight, only to find his body infested with… something — leans into it hard. The real reason I think you’ll like it, though, is that it’s hilarious. Comedy and horror are hard to pull off in comic form, because the element of timing is absent. Without near-perfect control over the reader’s visual flow, pratfalls and jump scares just look stupid. Stone is quietly terrific at both; there’s a gag here involving a heroic exit from a vent that still makes me giggle like a madman every time I think of it. Perfect for if you just want to relax with something fun for an evening.
Novels
Party at the World’s End, J. Curcio
This starts with a sort of Gaiman-esque mythpunk premise: “Forgetful demigods,” deities lost on the mortal plane, break out of a psychiatric institution and start a band together. Jesus is a trans lady, and she’s on bass. From there, things somehow get weirder, spiraling out into sex, psychedelia, chaos magick, and various matters of apocalyptic import. This is probably the best introduction to Curcio’s wildly ambitious Fallen Cycle, which traverses mediums and universes. Curcio is an artist willing and ready to try their hand at just about anything, and you already know their work; they did the two covers of Apocalypse 1999, which are splashed all over this website. Go see what else they can do.
Silk, Caitlin R. Kiernan
Kiernan is one of the acknowledged masters of weird fiction, but Silk, published in 1998, was their first novel. Their later work is spookier (The Red Tree, in particular, is a non-stop creepfest) and their style has gotten more distinctive (the influence of Billy Martin is obvious here in a way it wouldn’t be in Kiernan’s later work) but this is still a great starting point for Apocalypse readers, because, to be blunt, it’s really fuckin’ Goth. If you want to know what ‘90s Goth looked like from the inside, well, this one opens with a bunch of stoned kids listening to Marilyn Manson and watching horror movies with the sound turned off, and the verisimilitude only increases from there. For most of its page count, it’s hardly even horror — more like a slice-of-life indie movie for the Tim Burton set — but believe me, you’ll notice when the spiders show up.
Drawing Blood, Billy Martin
Billy Martin is the big, canonical presence on this list. He was part of the genre’s ‘80s and ‘90s paperback boom, along with King and Barker and Rice, but he was the young blood — a hipster kid who wrote Courtney Love biographies on the side and whose work incited more controversy than all three of the other big names combined. (He still publishes under “Poppy Z. Brite,” as he did then, but he’s moved away from horror as a genre, and he’s much clearer that it’s a pseudonym.) Be warned: Martin’s books will test your gore tolerance, especially since they often combine gooey, body-fluid-y sex with their violence. The blood-pouring sinks in Apocalypse are a nod to Drawing Blood, but Martin’s also pour semen. Yet Drawing Blood is at its core a very sweet romance, with only a few gruesomely murdered three-year-olds and floods of spooky ghost cum, and as such, it’s a good place to start. It also delights me to report that this is perhaps the single most ‘90s horror novel you will ever read — one of its characters is a “computer hacker,” its jacket copy includes the phrase “Trevor and his lover are caught in a cyber-maze,” and the acknowledgments thank Bruce Sterling, Trent Reznor, and “Bob” Dobbs from the Church of the Subgenius. Those were the days, kids; they will not come again.
Out of Salem, Hal Schrieve
What I appreciate most in this YA novel is that, though it taps into horror’s rich tradition of using the monster to represent queerness, its characters also just are queer; Z is a zombie and also genderqueer, their best friend Aysel is a lesbian and also a werewolf, and so on. Monstrousness is allowed to stand for many ways of being Other — physical disability, mental illness, immigration status — but the sexual and gender difference at the heart of the story is never hidden in the subtext. Also, you know, it’s trans Goth teen BFFs in the ‘90s. Granted, I wish I hadn’t read it nine (nine!) drafts into my own novel on that subject, but one cannot stop an idea whose time has come.
Cemetery Boys, Aiden Thomas
“Horror” is a less apt tag than “YA paranormal romance,” in this instance. Still, there’s just enough necromancy to qualify: Yadriel, a trans boy who comes from a line of brujxs, wants to show his family that he can perform the traditionally male magic of summoning and communicating with the dead, and therefore, summons a hot gay ghost. Things proceed in the direction indicated by the phrase “hot gay ghost.” Thomas sometimes has to be very careful about explaining what being transgender is, in a way that reminds you it’s still new to have these stories in the mainstream, but hopefully the massive, NYT-bestselling success of the book will clear the path for a world where young readers expect to see trans heroes.
Short Story Collections & Anthologies
Homesick, Nino Cipri
Cipri is often less interested in monsters than they are in what those monsters reveal about the human characters. The first story in Homesick, in which an actual, no-fooling ghost is introduced and then quickly ushered offstage so the two living characters can fall in love, sets the agenda in no uncertain terms. Cipri can be straightforwardly spooky — consider “Dead Air,” about a road trip to a town where something terrible keeps happening — but more often, their stories remind you of that famous description of jazz: You listen for the notes they’re not playing. “Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff,” a story about scientists discovering a race of prehistoric super-intelligent weasels, goes everywhere but where you’d expect a story about prehistoric super-intelligent weasels to go, and yet its landing place is absolutely perfect. Cipri’s dialogue is so elastic and true and funny, and their characters so intrinsically lovable, that you just want to hang out in the world of their stories and let things happen.
Everyone On The Moon Is Essential Personnel, Julian K. Jarboe
Jarboe’s work is much more literary than my bucket of Kentucky-fried genre garbage, and most of their stories aren’t horror so much as they are surrealism with dark shadows in the corners. They’re on this list, though, because their teenage characters are just indelible. “Self-Care,” in which a teen witch consigns the world to a watery grave, is simultaneously one of the funniest things you’ll ever read and the saddest; “The Nothing Spots Where Nobody Wants To Stay,” in which two young guys have an awkward half-relationship in a dissolving world, is so startlingly true to life you feel like a fourteen-year-old yourself reading it. (It’s not a pleasant feeling!) You wonder how Jarboe can manage to capture teenagers in such zitty, hair-gelled, casually sexist detail while also creating such deep tenderness for them, but then you remember the ones you knew, and it makes sense.
Anthologies
Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, ed. Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett
Like it says on the tin, this is sci-fi and fantasy, without any explicit bent toward horror. Yet the genres have always been close cousins — weird, 18th-century, generations-of-intermarriage-have-given-them-these-jawlines cousins, really — and certain stories, like Aisling Fae’s “Are You There, Satan? It’s Me, Laura,” about an educational demon-summoning, or Cooper Lee Bombardier’s “After the Big One,” about an apocalypse that occurs during a meeting of a trans support group, are very much on Apocalypse’s beat. As a tour of contemporary trans genre writers, this is one of the best and most accessible, especially since Plett recently put the PDF online for free. I know what I like; get in there and dig around yourself.
Transcendent: Best of Transgender Speculative Fiction, 1 - 4, ed. K.M. Szpara (Vol.1) and Bogi Takács (Vol. 2 - 4).
If all else fails, start here. The Transcendent series is probably the single best way to get a grasp on the landscape of trans genre fiction — you will, without fail, find at least one or two new writers to follow and support in each volume. Most of the anthologies are heavily dominated by science fiction, with fantasy coming a close second, but horror always finds a way to sneak in around the edges. Below, I’m listing some of the stories that I think would particularly appeal to your average Apocalypse reader, in part because they appealed to me:
From Transcendent 2:
The Pigeon Summer, Lee Mandelo. A childhood friendship and a ghost story — people overuse the word “tender,” but this is, and it’s so very beautiful for it, too.
Lisa’s Storie: Zombie Apocalypse, Gillian Ybabez. Honestly, there’s just something universal about a girl, a baseball bat and a lawn full of zombies.
From Transcendent 3:
Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue, Charlie Jane Anders. If you pitched me “trans girl Get Out,” I would ask you where to read it. If you told me it was by national treasure Charlie Jane Anders, I would not ask; I would throw my money at you with great force until you handed it over. Worth it.
The Mouse, Larissa Glasser. Deeply, crushingly sad. You’ll carry it around with you for days, but maybe you should have to.
Death You Deserve, Ryley Knowles. Again, the easiest reference here is cinematic; it’s a trans femme Scream, as a woman navigates her day by scanning it for horror tropes. Trans women are doing something really special with the slasher genre and the Final Girl these days, and I am ready for it.
Short Changes Over Long Periods of Time, K.M. Szpara. Gay trans vampire dysphoria! This feels really pulpy at first, like somebody’s White Wolf chronicle got way out of hand, but it settles into something very smart and chilling about the shortcomings of 21st-century medicine and what it means to have a body.
From Transcendent 4:
The Substance Of Our Lives, The Accident of Our Births, Jose Pablo Iriarte. A nonbinary teen who can remember all their past lives is tasked with solving (dun dun dun) their own murder!!! Such a fun paranormal-Veronica-Mars premise you wonder why it isn’t already a huge franchise.
Chokechain, Andrew Joseph White. What I admire about this story is how it operates by Rolling Stones logic. Nobody gets what they want, but somehow, everyone gets what they need.
Fundraising Update: In its first day, Apocalypse 1999 managed to raise $488.99 for our five selected organizations benefiting trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people. I would love to keep that going, and not just because getting to an even $500 will make it easier for me to do the math.
If you have donated, my very deep thanks. Everything is bonkers right now, but trans and genderqueer people will need support no matter what happens or who wins this election. I’m glad you made space in your life to help.
If you’re in the mood to donate, or just want something to read while the world falls down, this is for you: