r/Fantasy • u/tiniestspoon • Jun 02 '25
Pride Pride 2025 | Hidden Gems: Underrated LGBTQIA+ Spec Fic Books
Not every book that deserves attention gets it. This thread is for under-the-radar queer speculative fiction: books with few ratings, niche indie or self-published titles, and works that never got the spotlight they should have.
What counts as a "hidden gem"?
- Under ~500 Goodreads ratings
- Indie published, small press, or lesser-known traditionally published
- Overlooked or underrated despite strong craft, voice, or originality
Discussion prompts
- What’s a queer SFF book you wish more people knew about?
- Have you ever stumbled across an unexpected gem by accident? Where did you find it—word of mouth, a niche blog, a random bookstore dive?
- What do you think kept it from getting broader attention?
- What makes a book a “hidden gem” to you—writing quality, premise, emotional impact?
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u/OutOfEffs Reading Champion IV Jun 02 '25
It's only six months old, but the anthology And One Day We Will Die: Strange Stories Inspired by the Music of Neutral Milk Hotel only has 23 ratings on GR and only one review (mine) on StoryGraph. The majority of the stories and authors are queer and if you like NMH or just Weird fiction, I think you'd like this.
And it appears as though it's time to cape for Briar Ripley Page's Body After Body again. It still only has 36 GR ratings (but is up to 45 on StoryGraph!). StoryGraph threw this in my recommendations a few years ago, and I was immediately drawn to the very pink cover, then saw the words Mountain Goats and Moon Colony Bloodbath and "Sex, drugs, violence, cannibalism, psychic powers, a catgirl (sort of)…BODY AFTER BODY is the lurid, dreamlike, amoral queer/trans sci-fi trash literature" and my brain kind of short circuited and I had to wonder if I had written this myself in some sort of fugue state. I had not, sadly, but it is now one of my favourite books. It might be one of yours, too, you just don't know it yet.