Recs if you like She's Always Hungry...

Exactly what it sounds like. Books you read that make other people question "who is this diva" or "good for her"

An emergent subgrene by and about strange women on themes of female rage, sisterhood, hunger, attraction, beauty, motherhood, violence, and much more.

these books use (literal) hunger as a political tool to speak to women’s oppression, repression and desire, whether through overt cannibal metaphor, speculative dispatches, or more subtle nuances of appetite in literary fiction. these women are hungry for something more, whether they’re allowed to act on it or not.

recommendations welcome!

in the first edition of ‘the monstrous-feminine’, barbara creed challenges the dominant representation of women in horror films as victims, arguing that patriarchal ideology constructs women as monstrous because of their sexuality (or lack thereof).

later, creed reinterprets the monstrous-feminine as a being who embraces her body and reclaims her otherness. in line with this contemporary vision, these are books which use horror to redefine notions of ‘womanhood’.

recommendations welcome!

these books are both aligned with and offer a queering of ‘weird girl literature’, a genre that manipulates horror, dark comedy, and/or surrealist elements to excavate the internal world of complex and unconventional characters. they are deviant, daring, and perverse reads for the weird queers among us.

*girl in quotation marks to allow this list to extend beyond the binary. recommendations welcome!

...are unhinged, lonely, tortured, kooky, crazy, unmoored, yearning, plotting, stalking, monologuing, self-pitying, lost, etc.

Horror books to read just for the aesthetic

what it says on the tin! queer short story collections (including novels broken into standalone short stories) with a speculative bent; tinges of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, dystopia and the otherwise spiritual. attempting to keep the list quite curated, but recommendations are always welcome!

Pastels, lip gloss, and blood. This list features bubblegum horror stories that mix girly, candy coloured aesthetics with psychological terror, body horror, and chaotic feminine rage.

Horror stories focusing on female characters who commit acts of violence rather than being the victims.

Books with bizarre concepts

Weird books for weird girls

Eat your fears

Audiobooks that are less than 10 hours long and are safe for work AKA not aiming to get you (too) horned up at your desk (no guarantees that you won't cry or get the creeps though). Recommendations welcome!

i love an unhinged woman

All sorts of stories about all sorts of women. Mostly litfic, some horror.