What I Read in May
Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?
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Before we get started, a few bits of news that influenced or inspired this month’s reading:
In a story ripped straight from March’s “Books for the Last Days of the Girlboss,” OneTaste Inc. founder Nicole Daedone, whose company made waves among white women in the 2010s for its signature “orgasmic meditation” practice, was convicted of forced labor alongside her former sales director after the pair coerced several clients into becoming unpaid employees.1
I actually really enjoyed Thunderbolts, which quickly became catastrophic for my watching habits when I decided to revisit the first three Captain America movies for the first time in many, many years. Suffice it to say, I won’t be sharing any film highlights for this month.
Broadway’s Dead Outlaw, which, if you’ll remember, haunted me in April, won zero Tonys at Sunday’s ceremony. Sadly, neither did one of the best plays of the season, John Proctor is the Villain.
I made a last-minute decision this weekend to start work on a sequel to my 2024 Pride Pairings guide. Last year’s guide contained 10 reading and film recommendations. But a mountain of excellent queer and trans lit has emerged in the 12 months since that post, so I’ll be back (sometime) in the coming weeks with an updated roster. (Without giving too much away, new on the list are Zee Carlstrom’s Make Sure You Die Screaming, Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet, and many more.)
Finally, as I shared in my last post, I celebrated my birthday three weeks ago by making my way from Seaport to the Upper West Side by way of Manhattan’s bookstores. All in all, I left the weekend with six new books, which dominated the second half of my May reading cycle and have continued to dominate June.
Still on the list: Indelicacy by Amina Cain, Youthjuice by E.K. Sathue, Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (which I’m currently reading), and Fireweed by Lauren Haddad (which I actually finished this week, but since we’re well into June, I’ll save it for next month’s roundup).
The Lamb by Lucy Rose (HarperCollins, 2025)
Shortly after starting this story last month, I wrote, “Conceptually, The Lamb is totally a Moshfegh novel, but with every chapter, I’m gladder she didn’t write it.”
I was misguided.
Like her preteen protagonist, Lucy Rose cannot escape her (literary) mother. Moshfegh’s signatures—her insistence on the viscerally disgusting, her overindulgent instinct toward brutality for the sake of brutality, her reticence to resolve a plot line—seep into The Lamb. They poison what began as a fiercely unique, coyly paced coming-of-age thriller until it breaks down, contorting into a stunted fable, depressing for the sake of being so.
Ten years after Eileen, Moshfegh’s is the ghostly maternal hand choking The Lamb, cutting off what could have been a great bildungsroman horror story at the root. For a novel so obsessed with the impossibility of escaping one’s forebearers, it's strangely fitting.
But The Lamb began so hopeful. Set in a rural English homestead that feels somehow outside of place and time, The Lamb begins and ends with Margot, a preteen girl living in isolation with her cannibal mother, surviving on luring in stray travelers. Then her mother falls for one of the strays, derailing both Margot and the story she’d begun to tell. Margot’s world—one that once felt pregnant with potential, just beyond the horizon—just as soon becomes impossibly small again. Middle school is as unending as it feels. Stepmothers really were evil all along. There was never more to life, after all.
With Moshfegh’s nihilistic blood coursing through its veins, The Lamb ends how it was always going to, but it does so 75 pages before the novel is actually over. There was never any hope for Margot. Whatever hope was left for the story goes with her. There’s not much left in its wake.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga, 2025)
In a soon-to-be overcrowded market, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is, quietly, the high point of the contemporary vampire genre. It’s everything the medium can—and should, more often—accomplish in hands nimble enough to mold it.
A close contemporary of Sinners, this story similarly uses its monster as an entry point to force its audience towards a reckoning with some of the darkest parts of American history. But Jones approaches this challenge from the opposite angle as Coogler. He takes us back to the very beginning of vampire literature, to stories with an upstanding, white, Christian, unimpeachably innocent narrator bravely facing a foreign threat to his way of being. Then Jones turns that literary convention—and the genre itself—on its head, presses his thumb on the historical bruise to ask a long-unspoken question: was this ever that narrator’s story to tell? What monstrousness begat his precious way of life?
Jones’s story is a revenge tale by way of Dracula. An aging Lutheran pastor in 1912 Montana. A series of brutal murders that rock his small settlement. A lone Indigenous parishioner who seems to appear out of thin air, whose memories extend further back than should be possible. The labyrinthine pages of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter contain the fable that the mysterious parishioner demands to tell; but they also house a second tale, one of an unlikely, unfit narrator—a great-granddaughter, long estranged from her family history—who discovers his story a century later.
With a time-traveling epistolary structure that borrows from Stoker but harkens back to Shelley in Frankenstein, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter sees Jones reach his literary peak—and cement himself as the crown prince of Indigenous horror. It weaves together the narratives of three storytellers—a professor, a preacher, and a vampire—to tell the country’s oldest, most horrifying story, as only Jones could.
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead, 2024)
Take everything I say next with a grain of salt, as I did devour this novel in three days. That said…
The God of the Woods is, theoretically, for fans of Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You. Set on the grounds of a wealthy summer camp in the Adirondacks of 1975, The God of the Woods begins with a missing girl. Thirteen-year-old Barbara van Laar vanishes from her cabin overnight, and no one—not her camp counselors, not her sole friend, not her despondent mother—has any clue where she might have gone.
Like Makkai’s missing girl before her, the search for Barbara spreads like a virus, roping decades of backstory and an ever-growing ensemble into its web. Even before she disappears, Barbara is inextricably bound to another disappearance: that of her brother, Bear, 14 years earlier. A web of tragedy and unanswered questions connects the two siblings, and it leaves no one in their orbit untouched.
The God of the Woods is just as intricate as Makkai’s decade-spanning masterwork, but there’s something missing. Moore’s characters never turn out to be quite as complex as they first appear, and with each addition to the massive ensemble, they begin to feel less real. It’s as if, where Makkai takes a risk, Moore finds an easy way out. A convenient twist. A narrator with no personal connection to the case to cloud her judgment. A happy ending, of sorts. It’s not quite disappointing. But, not unlike its central characters, there’s an emptiness at its core.
Hellions: Stories by Julia Elliott (Tin House, 2025)
With Hellions, Julia Elliot tells eleven stories, bound together only by protagonists desperate to access another world. Her protagonists—sometimes wistful preteens, sometimes exhausted mothers, bewildered fathers, nuns—long for a taste of the divine, or else access it by chance and can’t tear themselves away. Elliot writes with undercurrents of the Southern Gothic, but something else lingers atop. Something quietly apocalyptic, an electrical current signaling the precipice of some catastrophic—or devastatingly mundane—end.
In “Bride,” a medieval nun becomes so fixated on rapture that she may inadvertently beget it. In “Hellion” and “All the Other Demons,” a hot, sticky Southern summer becomes its own kind of villain. In the fairytale-esque “Erl King” and “The Gricklemare,” monsters almost human linger at the edge of the woods, their presence almost a comfort. In “Another Frequency,” the presence becomes too powerful to ignore. To call Elliott a Gen X Angela Carter meets a Southern Carmen Maria Machado wouldn’t be far off, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough to capture the rich, uncanny, endlessly layered world that her stories manage to conjure.
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I’m not kidding about the first part of that sentence. This is quite literally the premise of Jessie Gaynor’s The Glow.
Just added the Buffalo Hunter Hunter to my tbr a few days ago after seeing it on a “best of the yr so far” roundup (Vulture’s maybe?), so I’m excited to see it here (and with a sinners comp)!! Felt almost exactly the same way about God of the Woods when I read it last summer… really intrigued by Liz Moore’s previous novel, though, Long Bright River, which I’m still hoping/planning to pick up sometime