The Transfeminine Review

Cover Image by Victória Kubiaki

When the nights grow dark and the jack-o-lanterns dot the streets, it’s time to read some bone-chilling transfeminine horror! This list is a direct sequel to last year’s rec list, “12 Spooky Books by Transfemmes to Read This Halloween,” and there’s absolutely no overlap. If you finish this list and you’re still looking for your vilest desires, I would highly recommend checking out that list too!

As with last year, I’ve included a Table of Contents for easy navigation.

1. ⭐ Black Flame (2025) – Gretchen Felker-Martin
2. F4 (2018) – Larissa Glasser
3. Gorman’s House (2025) – T.T. Madden
4. Anthony Shriek (1992) – Jessica Amanda Salmonson
5. ⭐ Sundown in San Ojuela (2024) – M.M. Olivas
6. A Game in Yellow (2025) – Hailey Piper
7. In The Sea-Cave (2025) – Savika
8. Chasers (2025) – Mariah Darling, Eve Harms
9. ⭐ Moonflow (2025) – Bitter Karella
10. These Rainy Autumn Nights (2024) – Erin Elkin
11. Frankenbutch (2025) – Fern V. Bedek
12. Withered (2024) – A.G.A. Wilmot

This year, my Spookiness Scale is making its triumphant return! We all have different tastes and comfort levels when it comes to scary fiction, and my aim is to make it easy to find books that appeal to your particular tastes, while avoiding others that don’t. Here’s a down-and-dirty explanation to help you find the perfect spice level for you:

🧙‍♀️ – Level One: Spooky but not Scary. It’s got beasties and mysterious forces galore, but it’s not gonna keep you up at night.

🧙‍♀️🦇- Level Two: Goosebumps. It’s got some jumps and scares, but nothing much worse than your neighborhood haunted house.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸 – Level Three: A Little Bloody. If you’ve got a phobia, this’ll hit you hard. But you might enjoy just being along for the ride.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸🫀 – Level Four: Getting Nasty. It’s gross. It’s intense. If you’ve don’t like horror as a genre, this is probably about where you’ll stop having fun.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸🫀🔪 – Level Five: Properly Scary. Don’t read these books in the middle of the night unless you’re willing to lose some sleep.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸🫀🔪☠️ – Level Six: Viscerally Disturbing. This is where I would start to class books as either “extreme horror” or “very direct about the nature of bigotry” (or both). It probably has a trigger warning on the cover. So, yknow, read the damn trigger warnings.

🧙‍♀️🦇🩸🫀🔪☠️🕊️ – Level Seven: Dead Dove. Don’t eat it. And don’t say we didn’t warn you.

I hope this helps you find your most terrifying fit!

As with last year, I’m also going to continue the tradition of putting gold stars (⭐) next to the books that I found to be literary standouts among the group. These are my biggest recommendations, but keep in mind that it’s my personal opinion as a critic, and ought to be taken with a grain of salt :))

An obvious disclaimer: this list is in no way meant to be exhaustive or comprehensive. If a book or author you love isn’t on here, I would encourage you to mention them in the comments! I’m only one person, and I only include books I’ve personally read on these lists, so keep that in mind as you’re working through my recs

Without further ado, let’s get to the list!

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Why You Should Read It: How can we write about transfeminine horror in 2025 without acknowledging the daily horrors of our everyday life under fascism? Black Flame is a novel for our times – a brutal, excoriating dissection of how marginalized peoples can participate in the mechanisms of their own oppression. Closeted, miserable Ellen Kramer’s fatal obsession with a censored Jewish drag film from the dying days of Weimar Germany plays both foil and monster to the most nauseating climax you’ll read this year. But it’s the gorgeous craftsmanship and vicious social commentary that makes Felker-Martin’s third novel an absolute must-read.

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Why You Should Read It: If you’re a fan of bizarre horror about trans sex workers and eldritch magics, this is one of the coolest deep cuts that’s still easily available for purchase. F4 is delightfully gross in ways you’ve probably never even considered before. A horny and disturbing little jaunt through the apocalypse.

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Why You Should Read It: Gorman’s House is loaded to the brim with fun 90s references and themes, and it wears its clear inspiration from Goosebumps on its sleeve. But even if you’re not a 90s kid/person, this book continues a really interesting conversation from last year’s The Familialists about Blackness, suburbia, and American culture. The horror elements take a while to get going, but have a real bite to them once the characters are lost in the haunted house.

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Why You Should Read It: Jessica Amanda Salmonson is one of the most important transfeminine novelists of the 20th Century, and her work has received very little readership from modern audiences. This book is complex and nuanced, and the fact that it tells a gripping and bleak tale of schizophrenia is only a small part of its literary interest and merit. Stephen King blurbed this for a reason. Be forewarned of dated Indigenous representation, though.

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Why You Should Read It: This was #3 on my Top Ten Novels of 2024 list, and for good reason! I absolutely loved this book. Sundown plays with perspective and tone in fascinating ways, creating a really thought-provoking dialogue about narrative agency and queer embodiment along the California/Mexico border. The horror elements aren’t half-bad either – the bloody suspense around our protagonist’s haunted family house is compelling, and the cat-and-mouse dynamic between the fugitive queer kid whispering to the monsters of the night and the gruff sheriff’s attempts to hunt him down adds a ton of depth. While I would primarily consider this a literary novel, I love this book way too much not to spotlight it again here.

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Why You Should Read It: For horror nerds with an interest in the literary history of the genre, A Game in Yellow plays out like a passionate conversation with the forebearers of cosmic and eldritch horror. Otherwise, it’s a tame entry from Piper – the horror elements are mostly secondary to the kinky relationship drama, and it’s more disturbing than scary per se. If you’re a fan of BDSM fiction and want some spice in your usual formula, this is the book for you.

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Why You Should Read It: If you’re looking for a book that’s doing something completely different than every other title on the list, look no further than this strange and very short novella from selfpub author Savika. “Eating weird animals and slowly turning into a sea monster” is a pretty out-of-left-field premise, but Savika really nails the floaty cerulean horror of a once-human person entrapped and eroded by the oceanic tides.

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Why You Should Read It: While Chasers is never quite as terrifying as Black Flame, make no mistake – the hopeless situation that Lenora finds herself in at the end of the book is a vulnerable trans woman’s worst nightmare. A Deus Ex Machina conclusion liberates our protagonist from a fate worse than death, but if things had gone differently, this could have been the most horrifying title on the list.

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Why You Should Read It: Bitter Karella’s debut novel is an absolute triumph in atmospheric storytelling and structural plot design. With an absolutely wonderful cast of characters and a masterful grasp of setting and tone, Moonflow is just a delight to read. And don’t let Karella fool you into a false sense of security like she did for me – the ending of this novel is vicious.

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Why You Should Read It: The biggest draw here is Elkin’s incredible prose – it’s atmospheric and gorgeously crafted, simply perfect for the time loop that the story swirls around. As a work of elevated literary TG/TF, Autumn Nights uses cosmic horror trappings as a fascinating foil to literalize the spiky egg paradigm. The true horror is the toxic dynamic between the main characters – as Sartre said, Hell is other people. Forced feminization in purgatorio.

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Why You Should Read It: For a writer who’s best known for their completely conflict-free feel good fluff titles, Bedek has managed to turn out a surprisingly disturbing horror novel that also manages to be one of the most interesting fusions of the romance and horror genres I’ve ever read. There are a lot of deeply dysfunctional polycules on this year’s list, and this is certainly one of them.

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Why You Should Read It: I wanted to end this year’s list with Withered because I think this book speaks to a different truth of why we read horror fiction – our struggles with loss, love, and the painful work it takes to let go of the dearly departed. Withered is a book about healing, about self-love, and about closure, and it uses the trappings of a classic haunted house novel to execute it beautifully.

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HALLOWEEN REC LISTS

2025 – 12 Chilling Books by Transfemmes to Read This Halloween

2024 – 12 Spooky Books by Transfemmes to Read This Halloween

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And that’s a wrap! Happy Halloween all, and I hope you found a good book to keep you occupied this week ❤ Again, is there a transfemme horror novel you think I should read? Do you have a favorite book not mentioned here? Put it in the comments!

With much love, Beth

LAST WEDNESDAY: #15 – Should Critics Read Bad Books?

NEXT WEDNESDAY: #17 – The 14 Types of Voters at a Literary Awards

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