Queer Places and Haunted Structures: 9 Books That Play with Form

A submarine is always a liminal place, and this one seems to be haunted by something unspeakable. We watch as a queer woman’s body undergoes a transformation. This is body horror, sure, but there’s something beautiful and compelling about it, too, that has me coming back, again and again, to its strange delights.

What if an IKEA-like big box retail store were actually a doorway to parallel universes? Here, queer people discuss labor while facing the absurdities of retail work. Grandma may have been killed by parasitic plants, but the real horror is capitalism.

The most queerly structured memoir I’ve ever seen, a book about domestic violence, haunted by fairy tales and narrative tropes (aren’t we all?).

A raw and urgent book about, among other things, a haunted house that is also the fascist, racist heart of England.

Hell is a beast with its mouth open, and the city of Bruges is besieged by its Chatelaine and her army of chimeras.

One of my favorite books in recent years (what do you mean 2014 was more than a decade ago?), it blurs the lines between infection, invasion, and haunting.

It has been variously described as a fix-up novel, as fantasy, science fiction, and romance, but I think it’s its own brilliant, strange beast. An experimental literary miracle that everyone should read at least twice.

Part dark academia, part gothic thriller, part science fiction, this book, to me, is about presence, about the structures that engulf us, and the beauty of both resistance and surrender.

If we’re talking about strange structures, we can’t not talk about this one. I revisit the House, with its infinite halls and strange vestibules, with its clouds and its ocean, regularly. You can, too.