Never Rest
Nineteen-year-old Jake Margate has had terminal leukemia for five years and is ready to let go but his mother has other ideas. She’s found a rogue doctor pursuing radical treatments and takes her son to a remote institute where he does seem to get better…at first. But then the treatment begins to fail in strange ways just as Jake begins to fall for another of the test subjects. Slowly, he realizes he’s been turned into something truly horrible. Two-timeLambda Literary Award-winning author Thornton has written a contemporary queer twist on the Frankenstein monster story.
"Never Rest injects new life into the gay Bildungsroman with his dark yet wry tale; dying boy meets dying boy has never been rendered so well." - Steve Berman, author of Vintage: A Ghost Story
Lily
by Michael Thomas Ford
illustrated by Staven Andersen
Lily is a girl who discovers she has the ability to see how others will die simply by touching them. Only she doesn't want this gift, and takes extreme measure to protect herself from it. When her mother--because every fairy tale has to have a wicked (step)mother--sells Lily's services to an evangelical preacher and his wildly popular travelling tent revival, Lily is torn away from the idyllic place she's always known as home and thrust into a world of greed and manipulation that threatens to destroy her unless she can find a way back....if she survives the quest the old witch Baba Yaga has given her...or the attention of the tent revivalist who promises to save her soul.
Paperback, 262 pages, with illustrations
A deluxe hardcover edition with even more good stuff is available
Red Caps
New Fairy Tales for Out of the Ordinary Readers
by Steve Berman
Red Caps might be a rock band. Or they might be something more sinister, a fey source of sounds that are but the backdrop to thrills and misadventures. These thirteen stories provide readers jaded with the traditional, Old World fairy tales and tempts them with new stories that will engage bored readers from their suburban ennui. Closets are waiting to be explored. Escape from work camp leads to a dangerous encounter on a wet road. That high school year book is magical and might be mocking you...or helping you find love. And isn't love one of the central premises of the fairy tale? These teenage boys and girls need not fear that their love has no worth, because Steve Berman has written for them princesses who love maidens and adorkable students who have wondrous and smart boyfriends. Readers can be assured that, if the tale does not end happy, it ends most memorably.
Table of Contents
"The Harvestbuck"
"Most Likely"
"Cruel Movember"
"Thimbleriggery and Fledglings"
"Bittersweet"
"All Smiles"
"Persimmon, Teeth, and Boys"
"Gomorrahs of the Deep"
"A Calenture of the Jungle"
"Steeped in Debts to the Chimney-Pots"
"Only Lost Boys Are Found"
Paperback with illustrations
"Stylish and compelling, this will find an audience with many a teen, gay, straight, or those that refuse to be labeled." - Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books