Recs if you like Salt Slow...

every struggled to find actual lesbian/sapphic books when at the library or bookstore? so did I!

bc of said struggle, I started to curate a personal list of books that either has lesbian MCs and/or featured a primary sapphic romance.

i haven't read all of these, but I do try my diligence in confirming that they meet the above perimeters, since many books claim to be sapphic when they're not. this is an ever updating list, only fiction for now!

in progress

Basically, a huge list of every book I ever heard features sapphic characters.

I have not read all of these, so I cannot be sure of the amount of the time on page of the sapphic characters or of the quality of the books.

Some of these I do not plan to read at all, since they are not my style. If you feel like a book doesn't belong here, let me know.

For my favs / read, check out my other lists & shelves.

Open to suggestions for more titles.

Don't shoot the messenger.

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!

as an antidote to the ‘bury your gays’ trope, here are queers who defy death; who are reincarnated, immortalised, or escape death by the skin of their teeth. these characters may die at some point following this, but are allowed well-rounded arcs before that point.

please note that due to the nature of the list, spoilers may follow. enter at your own risk.

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!

climate fic set in worlds impacted by rising water levels

recommendations welcome, as always!

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!

books set in drowned or drowning worlds

in which nothing happens or a lot happens, but sometimes it feels like nothing at all.

also known as: lit fic that feels like a dream or a nightmare or a hallucination.

Collected lists of Fantasy themed WLW, both suggested by other Pagebound readers and myself! ☺️

Books on my TBR with LGBTQIA+ characters or themes.

body horror as a metaphor for autonomy, mental health & identity

When you want to read something a step above trash

or lakeside…or pondside…books that immerse us in a haunting, strange, beautiful, decadent, or unsettling coastal or waterside atmosphere

the books that are most interesting, inventive, and complex for the girlhood studies grad student in me. whose “girlhood” are we talking about? i’m thinking of girlhood as a liminal, queer, socially constructed, often traumatic, uncanny space.

Anthologies of short stories in the horror or speculative fiction genre! Tales will be spooky, thrilling, and maybe more than a little weird!

Inspired by Florence + The Machine's new album