OF MONSTERS AND MAINFRAMES, fun and funny space cozy horror story

OF MONSTERS AND MAINFRAMES
BARBARA TRUELOVE
Bindery Books/Ezeekat Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending June 2, 2026

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: LA Times Bestseller ** 2025 Goodreads Choice Award Finalist ** Spotify Best Book of the Year

Spaceships aren’t programmed to seek revenge—but for Dracula, Demeter will make an exception.

Demeter just wants to do her job: shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying—and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans.

To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team of monsters: A werewolf. An engineer built from the dead. A pharaoh with otherworldly powers. A vampire with a grudge. A fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil—Dracula.

The queer love child of pulp horror and classic sci-fi, Of Monsters and Mainframes is a dazzling, heartfelt odyssey that probes what it means to be one of society’s monsters—and explores the many types of friendship that make us human.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I remember The Ship Who Sang cycle of stories from the 1960s. Anne McCaffrey'se sentient ship made me both shudder...what a horrifying fate, to be trapped in a partial life as the brains of a machine!...and thrill...no bodily death! incredible adventures no way you'd have otherwise!, but I never once thought of that ship being thought of by its peers and its employers as a possible serial killer. What a cool twist, I thought as I downloaded the DRC. Even cooler because she's named after the ship that brings Dracula to Whitby! And Dracula in space? A cast of Universal Studios monsters helping Demeter clear her name? Hell to the yeah!

Using an AI in place of McCaffrey's human brain while adding a medical AI (called Steward) as a foil, an equal rival, the story gets all the squicked-by-Humankind fun of Murderbot and all the pathos of the misunderstood Other trying to live its life out as it sees fit with the technology-based humor (the AI runs on battery packs, with humorous possibilities well-mined by Truelove) that keeps you on the readerly hop.

It was fun, it was funny, it was a good afternoon's entertainment. I was never inclined to put it down, I wanted to know "...and then what?" but, honestly, it was light on larger ideas so I can't go much over three-and-a-half stars. It's the kind of book I'll recommend for SF fans who aren't squeamish (or arachnophobic) because the counterpoint to the humor is horror. It's a niche that will, I suspect, attract imitators because it goes down so easy.

A story that really does a good job of wiling away a few hours most pleasantly. Don't expect your mind to be blown and make sure the genre is agreeable (very low steam in the romance department, too), and you're okay with spiders and a dose of gore less than a Stephen Graham Jones novel but still there. Smiles await you if those are all true.

LADIES IN HATING (Belvoir's Library #3), charming sapphic Regency romance

LADIES IN HATING (Belvoir's Library #3)
ALEXANDRA VASTI
St. Martin's Griffin (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A pair of Gothic novelists trade rivalry for love in this swoony, steamy, sapphic Regency by USA Today bestselling author Alexandra Vasti.

Celebrated authoress Lady Georgiana Cleeve has achieved fame and fortune. Unfortunately, she’s also acquired an enemy: the enigmatic Lady Darling, whose spine-tingling plots appear to be pulled straight from Georgiana’s own manuscripts. What’s a stubborn, steely writer to do? Unmask her rival, of course.

But unmasking doesn’t go according to plan—because Lady Darling is actually Cat Lacey, the butler’s daughter and object of Georgiana’s very secret, very embarrassing teenage infatuation.

Cat Lacey has spent a decade clawing her family out of poverty. The last thing she needs is to be distracted by the stunning(ly pretentious) Lady Georgiana Cleeve. But Cat can’t seem to escape her infuriatingly beautiful rival—including at the eerie manor where they both plan to set their next books. The plot unexpectedly thickens, however, when the novelists find themselves trapped in the manor together. In between ghostly moans and spectral staff, Cat and Georgiana come face-to-face with real danger: the scorching passion that’s been haunting their rivalry all along.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Anyone need an enemies-to-lovers sapphic romance? This one will fill the need with verve and enthusiasm. I'm pretty sure the fact that the enemies are both lady novelists in Regency England is the biggest fantasy leap in the book. I suspect the family dynamic, the class dynamics, while all massaged for our twenty-first century sensibilities really did occur in some form. In reality, families usually find a way to heal where there was a solid foundation of love underpinning them.

As the third of a trilogy I've not read the first two of, I expected to be at sea. I was not. I assume that's down to the nature of romances, but it could easily be the author's real intent to make this a standalone that might convince one to go back and pick up the first two. (They're cishet so that's a firm no from me.) It did lend the story a richer background in that I felt I was coming into the action where everyone knew everyone else and I needed to figure that web of relationship out. I'm okay with that. If you are not, I'll reassure you that the author was careful to supply the kind of details that an experienced reader puts together readily. The picture created is a rich tapestry of emotional relationships that felt very realistic.

Immersed in this story was a very agreeable place to be in a news cycle so filled with horrifying and unnervingly personal murders. I live in the same world as some people with guns who hate me across multiple identity axes. It pays to put your mind into a better place, one where conflict exists but is not going to lead to lethal outcomes but resolutions and HEAs for its lovely people. I'm sure any of my QUILTBAG siblings could find comfort in this story of two of our forebears finding love and healing generational wounds. It should only happen for all of us in this vale of tears.

THE SALVAGE, sapphic Gothic Scottish fun

THE SALVAGE
ANBARA SALAM
Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A twisting, gothic literary thriller sure to delight fans of Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, The Wonder by Emma Donaghue, and The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.

It is 1962, and Marta Khoury, a trailblazing marine archaeologist, has been called to Cairnroch, a small island off the east coast of Scotland. A Victorian shipwreck, dragged from arctic waters, holds the remains of a celebrated explorer and the treasures of his final expedition. But on her first dive down to the ship, Marta becomes convinced she has seen a dark figure lurking amid the wreckage.

When the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deep chill of a record-breaking winter keeps Marta stranded on Cairnroch, she forms a relationship with Elsie, a local woman working in the island’s only hotel. When the ship's artefacts inexplicably disappear, Marta and Elsie have to brave the freezing conditions to search for the missing objects before anyone else catches on. As something eerie seems to follow her at every step, Marta must confront if the haunting is a figment of her imagination, the repercussions from a terrible mistake from her past, or if something more sinister is at play that will trap her and everyone on the island—and their secrets—in an icy wilderness.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sapphic gothic ghost story set in the icy winter waters of the North Sea off Scotland? Meat and drink! Get in my eyeholes!

Marta, a woman in the dangerous business of commercial salvage diving in 1962, is a rarity. It's her husband who runs things, and maybe it's just me but seems to me he's not averse to taking on jobs that put Marta in very significant danger. As the story unfolds, there are secrets in this marriage that, well, that cast doubts....

She's evidently, however, still down with this. Not only does her narrative voice convey very significant pleasure in the underwater world, she's at her sharpest while observing the wreck off Cairnroch. The eerie shadow? That's not an object, that's a being and no being not suited up like her belongs down there. Anyone would get the hell away as fast as possible!

Returning to the surface, badly shaken but with her inventory of the salvage to be collected, there occur things to prevent her from going down to begin salvage right away. On the return trip, she discovers there are very significant items missing...she inventoried them, now they're not there. (Listing them would be spoilery, so no on that.) What's happened? It's not like deep salvage diving is something just anyone can do, nor is it obvious how the heck the stuff was removed, or where it could've gone.

It makes the cold reception of the (quite Calvinist) Cairnroch people more pronounced...the treasure belonged to a very revered local hero, whose family has commissioned the recovery of material to fill a museum on the island. The extreme cold of that winter, the greatly heated up Cold War (this was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis), and the weird behavior of the islanders towards her make Marta...uneasy...plus, after the artifacts she was to salvage got disappeared, things got no better. Worse, in fact as now she can't shake the sense of being followed...since the Presence on the wreck gave her a scare.

With all the troubles piling up, Marta needs backup. Her husband isn't there, wouldn't be likely to help if he was...he's still angry over some stuff...though he is still her boss. Anyway a local will be more help because things are weird in this place she's isolated inside by weather, world events, and the job she still needs to pull off in order to get paid.

Enter Elsie. She's so local she works at Cairnroch's only hotel. She and Marta are...eyeing each other up...so maybe she will act as Marta's go-between to see what the hell's happening here. And on this super religious rock, Elsie's probably never had a better opportunity for a hook-up. And I do not think anyone on the island's at all fooled by their sneakin' ways. It's another layer of Other in a world obsessed, in that terrible, cruel Calvinist way, with Us-v-Them. I was pretty unconvinced by the way the "special friendship" developed considering Marta's dramatically obvious Otherness and Elsie's being One of Us to the islanders.

The resolution to the different situations arrives as one would hope it would, arising from the events Author Salam's created; but honestly it was waaay later than it would ideally have been. Marta and Elsie aren't any closer at the end than is decorous. It felt to me that, for three-quarters of the book, I was hoping Marta's husband would show up and stir the pot, or something equally dramatic.

This is not a dramatic book. It's all vibes. Really, really good vibes...I put my cardigan on half a dozen times despite it being seventy degrees in here...but short on the stuff of drama. Fights? Not even verbal ones. Hauntings? Self-inflicted ones galore. All very interesting to me. Not terribly exciting.

As someone who appreciates a narrator who isn't seeing what's really happening but instead what her shadows let her see, I was fine with this. Marta, Syrian/Scot like the author is, is a woman out of every place she's ever been put. Check. Marta's really sure she Knows the Score, despite not seeing the hoop half the time. Check. Marta's never let her defenses down, not for anyone; too risky. Check. The list goes on.

Reading diary entries is a very gothic way to build suspense. I myownself don't think it works in favor of low-conflict, high vibes stories so that seems like a miss to me. It would be a five-star read as an only-vibes novella; it only gets to four stars as a heavy-vibes gothic eerie haunted-house novel, with too little (and too incredibly uncritically unexamined) sapphic stuff to really get past the gate into the churchyard.

So I can't recommend it unreservedly but can definitely say there's a pleasurable red here for a vibes reader seeking wintertime chills; anyone who likes underwater scenes is going to purr happily, as they're some of the most effective writing in the story; and those in love with a ghost story for Yule.

LIVE IT OUT, sapphic second-chance romance told with honesty and beauty

LIVE IT OUT
JENN ALEXANDER
Bywater Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spencer Adams was never expected to be anything more than a high school dropout. She’d been a troubled teen, spending more time at the skate park than in school, at least until her music teacher introduced her to the guitar and music class became her lifeline. Ten years later, she is the guitarist in a band that has become a breakout success, and she wants to use that success to help other teens who have had the same rough start as her. She takes on a volunteer project with local youth as a way of honoring her past, not knowing that it will force her to revisit the one part of her past that she’d hoped to forget.

Faith Siebert has always had high expectations to live up to, and she has tried her best to fulfill those expectations, to be a good daughter, a good student, and a good friend. When she fell for Spencer in high school, she knew her family and friends would never approve. Scared of their reactions, Faith ended things with Spencer, following the path her parents wanted for her, even at the immense personal cost. Of course, it had only been a high school romance, destined for brevity anyway. At least, that’s what she told herself. But when Spencer shows up in her life once again, partnered with Faith on a youth music project, her world is rocked and she is forced to re-examine everything she knows about relationships and herself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not much for rock-star romances, me, but I am a vulturous carrion-seeker for the corpses of heartbreaks past on second-chance narratives. Give me a high-school/college breakup undone decades later and I am on it like a Jane Austen bonnet. Add in the fact that the parties are a same-sex couple denied a natural ending by homophobia (internal or external, makes me no never-mind) and stand back while I run to get it. Didn't hurt your foot, did I?

I got what I was expecting in this read. I loved Spencer's complete willingness to use her skills to help kids in the same bad situation she came from to cope, on many levels, with their sense of powerlessness and absence of agency. True, they won't become rock stars but they will learn how to play a musical intrument...a thing that by itself increases one's satisfaction with one's life.

Faith, the One That Got Away for Spencer, believes it will and is surprised when it's Spencer who shows up to do the teaching. Her career as a social worker is so in-character for the girl she was all the way back in high school, it felt on the nose. I like social workers, and deeply admire their sense of purpose. I'm all in for a redemption arc here, as well, because Spencer's going back to her roots as a shelter-raised kid to extend her hand in helpful practicality.

Do I need to say that these women find their way into a relationship? It's a category romance. Of course they do.

In forming that long-delayed, much-desired romantic reconnection, each of them has to come to terms with her own part in their long estrangement, what it cost them both, and how best to use the rubble of the past to build a good solid foundation. Here is where I felt both the happiest, because the women are truly honest with themselves and each other; and here is also where I felt the length of the book worked against it the most clearly. There wasn;t room to go into the families, or the people they were leaving behind. That was less of an issue, though, than the way the women were ready for that hard, hard, hard task of being vulnerable and honest within their strengthening bond. I can't say it's unlikely...the author's a therapist by trade, she knows better than I do...but I can say that even fifty more pages with some conversations outside their bond would've helped me invest in the resolution.

That said, I give the book as it is a recommendation, tinged with a litte note of caution for the ewww-ick homophobes because there is some steam in here. (I just turned the pages faster.) The story builds its couple's bond well, believably if very quickly, and tells hard emotional truths with honest, sensitive truthfulness.
I'm really glad that Jenn Alexander has more work for me to get acquainted with.

PERFUME & PAIN, raucous raunchy ribald reading...go get one NOW!

PERFUME & PAIN
ANNA DORN
Simon & Schuster
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A controversial Los Angeles author attempts to revive her career and finally find true love in this hilarious nod to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction.

Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student who smells like metallic orchids and is researching 1950s lesbian pulp, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.

Penelope, a painter living off Urban Outfitters settlement money, immediately ingratiates herself in Astrid’s life, bonding with her best friends and family, just as Astrid and Ivy begin to date in person. Astrid feels judged and threatened by Penelope, a responsible older vegan, but also finds her irresistibly sexy.

When Astrid receives an unexpected call from her agent with the news that actress and influencer Kat Gold wants to adapt her previous novel for TV, Astrid finally has a chance to resurrect her waning career. But the pressure causes Astrid’s worst vice to rear its head—the Patricia Highsmith, a blend of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—and results in blackouts and a disturbing series of events.

Unapologetically feminine yet ribald, steamy yet hilarious, Anna Dorn has crafted an exquisite homage to the lesbian pulp of yore, reclaiming it for our internet- and celebrity-obsessed world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Have you read Highsmith's Carol (aka The Price of Salt)? This has that particular kind of Questa o Quella? Rigoletto-but-sapphic-romance aura. And, follow-up concept, are you aware that Highsmith was a cruel, nasty piece of work? This has that same mean-creative story aura.

Having now hooked a few, driven a few off, and confused most, let's talk about lesbians. I'm the gay brother of a spiky, difficult lesbian. (She said so before I did! But, to be scrupulously fair, our entire family is/was spiky and difficult.) Astrid's 'tude is nowhere near as unkind as the reviews led me to believe it would be, by my own family's standards. What she is, that seems to surprise and unnerve the people around her in the story, is what I think interesting people usually are: Opinionated. I note without pleasure that opinionated women get miles of stick from persons of all genders and orientations. Just ask Hillary Clinton if you doubt me. It shows also in the readers' reviews I've seen around and about. Lots of people, even the ones who liked the story fine, commented on how abrasive Astrid was. Well, yeah. She's smarter than a solid 95% of the people around her. She's in a highly stressed passage in her life. She's abrasive because she's rubbed raw by her life.

Her happy place is perfume. Think about what that means. She collects something that is designed to hide and to enhance a person's most intimate quality, their smell. She doesn't even collect the stuff itself! She collects the containers...the carefully designed vessels that seduce the eyes but in and of themselves provide nothing but a space to be filled! The capitalist/consumer seductions carefully designed to increase your (largely female, as these are perfume bottles) cultural anxiety about your fundamental attractor or repeller of intimacy, smell!

This Anna Dorn, she knows her onions. Show me, please, another author whose depth of character development includes these intense sociopolitical shades whose prose isn't clunking, juddering, jelly-like didacticism. Author Dorn's got little enough competition in the witty-banter segment. She's sui generis in the segment of the Venn diagram where that overlaps anti-capitalist/feminist discourse.

Happily so. I'm glad Simon & Schuster offered me this DRC because, old gay man that I am, I hadn't heard of Author Dorn before. Now it's me for Vagablonde.

I see a few raised eyebrows contemplating an expected fifth star, after that gush. I wanted to put a fifth star on, I promise! I couldn't because Astrid being wishy-washy about Ivy-vs-Penelope was overplayed. I think will-they-won't-they is an easy trope to allow to outstay its actual usefulness. My perception is that this is what happened here. I'm also a wee bit wary of things like cancel culture/getting canceled being enshrined in stories that say bigger, more trenchant things about inclusion and cultural norms. It feels more like an add-on to use Astrid's canceling for her unguarded comments than an actual feature of the entire conversation the rest of the story is having about the greater issues abovementioned.

So okay, I didn't find myself sitting slackjawed, wondering how this author faceted this sparkling thousand-carat diamond. (That experience is what I call six-stars-of-five storytelling.) But make no mistake, this wordsmith will be on my readar as I wait for her to do just that.

It seems very likely to happen.

2024 NEBULA WINNER: SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN, Literature's pipe organ with the "Strange" stop pulled all the way out

SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN
JOHN WISWELL
DAW Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

WINNER of the 2024 Nebula Award!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover this creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster—by Nebula Award-winning debut author John Wiswell

Shesheshen has made a mistake fatal to all monsters: she's fallen in love.

Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth.

However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she’s found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human. Homily is kind and nurturing and would make an excellent co-parent: an ideal place to lay Shesheshen’s eggs so their young could devour Homily from the inside out. But as they grow close, she realizes humans don’t think about love that way.

Shesheshen hates keeping her identity secret from Homily, but just as she’s about to confess, Homily reveals why she’s in the area: she’s hunting a shapeshifting monster that supposedly cursed her family. Has Shesheshen seen it anywhere?

Eating her girlfriend isn’t an option. Shesheshen didn’t curse anyone, but to give herself and Homily a chance at happiness, she has to figure out why Homily’s twisted family thinks she did. As the hunt for the monster becomes increasingly deadly, Shesheshen must unearth the truth quickly, or soon both of their lives will be at risk.

And the bigger challenge remains: surviving her toxic in-laws long enough to learn to build a life with, rather than in, the love of her life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really hoped that I'd find something that recalled for me the affect and effect of Mrs Caliban in this book.

Not so much.

This being the twenty-first century, I get it; that kind of quiet exploration of repressed rage and thwarted love is not the way this louder, more boisterous time copes with Life. Also, the author's an ace man. We aren't much for writing quiet women unless they are silenced by our power and privilege over them. (Look at the mind-numbing abundance of male-authored "thrillers" centering sex crimes against women sometime.) What this book does, then, is entirely unlike what I was prepared for.

This is a large pipe organ's keyboard. The stops, those round thingies, are the way the organist chooses the kind of sound...brash blaring trumpets, quiet soft woodwinds...the instrument will send into your ears. Author Wiswell pulled the "Strange" stop on his book's keyboard all the way out and then used the loud pedal.

The idea of this being reproducing in the same unspeakably horrifying way that wasps do is nightmarish enough for me. I absolutely abominate wasps. But then to be confronted with Shesheshen, the wasplike alien's, twisted psychology...finding its parasitic fatal-for-Homily (her intended victim) reproductive strategy LOVING!...and I thought, "that's me out!"

And then...

The reason I kept going, pushing past the extreme horripilation induced at the mere notion of this, this travesty on Love was the strength of my horror. If I am this repulsed and infuriated, the author is saying something loud and clear, and however much I don't *like* hearing it I should listen. I am honestly surprised to say I am glad that I did.

Female-presenting monsters are having A Moment, it seems...Alasdair Gray's Poor Things, a book I did not like but a film that was a note-perfect adaptation of it most recently....and Author Wiswell's more SFnal take on it surpasses that deeply strange story. In imaging an alien just trying to exist, as "Bella Baxter" does, as Frankenstein's monster does, but in such a revulsion-evoking way, Author Wiswell makes his readers stop and think: "where is my horror coming from?" Survival by consuming one's host is appalling! When one is the host, yes; but really, are we any different? We are using up the planet, we are complicit in the slave labor that provides us the benefits of food to eat, as well as the devices you're reading and I'm writing this on, and that offers the laborers nothing but early graves.

Some people who reviewed the book on Goodreads had some reservations about the nature of a man writing a love story between a woman and a female-presenting alien, when the love was not sapphic but asexual. To me, this felt like a feature, not a bug (!), because the point was asexuality. That was something I found moving, once I wrapped my head around it; the lovers are genuinely in love and they cannot deny or repress their feelings, nor are these feelings physiologically expressed through sex. If this is something you are unfamiliar with, I recommend reading the excellent Ace by Angela Chen. It was that book that, for the first time, presented me with information about the experience of asexuality, by an asexual person; it is extremely illuminating for someone not asexual.

The attentive have noticed my rating lacks a star despite my laudatory comments. This is not due to its sexual challenge to the allo overculture. It is due to the frankly peculiar pacing, too slow then zooming through character-building opportunities; it's due to the amount of body horror exceeding my personal limits; it's due to my very old-fashioned purseylipped response to the amount of lying Shesheshen does to Homily, that never causes any comment or evokes any sense of betrayal, nor causes Homily to require some assurance that she *can* trust Shesheshen.

Also I kept reading her name as "Hominy" and, considering she was being assessed as a meal by Shesheshen, it made me giggle most immaturely.

None of my minor crotchets should stop you from getting this deeply affecting and very peculiar story into your eyeholes. Soonest.