Lovecraft, and my love of fantasy and fascination with horror combined into a terrible, amorphous thing. Obsessed with adding to my night terrors, I went through my mother’s horror collection of Graham Masterton, Ramsay Campbell, and Stephen King. Too young for Alien, I found a movie picture book with endless photographic plates that reproduced the experience in the most lingering way possible every rumble of my stomach soon became a potential chest-burster, and Xenomorphs hunted me in my sleep.

I became paranoid about my own dreams and writings, and I suffered chronic nightmares (and still do). In my early teens, I genuinely believed that anything could become true if I thought about it too closely. (I read the Lord of the Rings too early, and so loved it while not quite understanding it.) At home, I consumed Discworld novels, not getting all the jokes but amused anyway, passively absorbing adult ideas that served me well much later.Īt the same time, however, I suffered from an increasingly tenuous grip on reality.

I found much more joy in the Chronicles of Prydain I yearned to have a bauble like Eilonwy’s, and Arawn reminded me of Sauron but in a more digestible form. My Catholic school library held a surprisingly rich supply of fantasy novels, including a Christian-flavoured series that pitted adventurous teenage archaeologists against terrors from the Book of Revelation. They were subtle guardians, in fact, so that I often forgot it was they who watched over me it was as if the books themselves kept my persecutors at bay.

The shelves offered real protection, secret tunnels for the bookish few, and the librarians kept vigilant. I spent my school years in libraries, as many queer children do. In her marvellous post below, Eden writes about escaping into books, at first for succour, and then for power, reminding us of literature’s capacity to transform. The only thing she enjoys more than writing about queer cyborgs is the certain fact that, someday, she will become one. A sultry genderqueer rascal, she is the author of two lesbian fantasy romances – The Diplomatand Fruit of the Golden Vine, both published by Bella Books – and the forthcoming Reintegration, a trans-themed post-apocalyptic cyberpunk thingy. She is presently signed to Queer Pack, a new diversity-focused imprint of Ylva Publishing. French has penned some excellent words for us. Eden is an award-winning novelist and graduate researcher. Over May we’re hosting a focus on lesbian/queer women writers, and we’re very happy that Eden S.

Reintegration by Eden S. French