Beautiful, Terrible Things is an adult urban fantasy novel that explores the toxic dynamics of dysfunctional families, why we love the people who hurt us, and how far we will go for the people we love. For over a century, Portland has been ruled by three supernatural families: the McCulloughs, a nest of ruthless vampires, the Sinclairs, a pack of cutthroat werewolves, and the Takeuchis, a family of dangerous kitsune. They have enjoyed a shaky peace, one that Shiki Takeuchi and Dominic Wright have preserved with their supernatural speakeasy, a safe zone with only one rule: No Fighting. But when Mina Takeuchi’s body turns up dead in her mother’s driveway with signs that the wolves are to blame, tensions ignite. As shots are fired and bodies drop on all sides, their relationship is put to the test and their families demand they pick a side. Dom and Shiki must protect each other as they navigate feuding families, town politics, and a city on the verge of war. But in a town where violence is the strongest currency, everyone must pay. 

Because as much as Dom promised that this wasn’t Shiki’s fault, it was. His family’s grief, his mother’s impulsivity, his own fear, had caused this. Shiki might as well have locked him in that room himself. And no matter how they swore they could get through this, could protect each other, the fact remained that Dom’s pack had antagonized his family twice. Round and around they went, a carousel of chaos, clinging to each other as their world blurred into violence. He heard Rin in his head, his reminder that things like them did not get happy endings. And as Shiki held Dom on their bathroom floor, his throat clogged with the fear he might be right.

Ruinous Wings is a young adult fantasy novel that examines the drive to seek power and how the power of others can shape our lives. In a world where the gods grant magic to favored mortals through divine birds, those who lack the proper training and affluence are often left at the mercy of Volitants, those who have been blessed with magic. Aina is a pickpocket whose only trusted friend was killed in a Volitant’s battle. Vib is a thief and a liar obsessed with the pursuit of fame, even as she runs from her past. Kay is an apprentice historian in a Volitant temple, trapped in a life he does not want for the crimes of his family. When Aina steals a divine bird and is given destructive magic from a mysterious god, the three must work together to stop a brewing war and decide what power is worth to them. 

The Volitants had appeared at the end of the line, riding pale horses. They were not in uniform, instead dressing however they pleased, their spines a little straighter, their faces more serene, and on their gauntleted fists they carried their great Caelum birds with their glossy black and gold feathers and fierce golden eyes. There were nine of them present, all gods-blessed and gleaming, but her gaze rested on the man at the head dressed in a long red coat who rode a magnificent warhorse. His face was less serene than it was impassive. His eyes, a flinty blue, roamed the crowds with the lazy scrutiny of a cat confident in its place. At his side, he carried a great sword, and his bird hunched low on his fist, less like the sharper birds of the other Volitants and more like a vulture. 

This man could only be Orthos, favorite of the war god’s servants, champion of the kingdom of Valland. The ruthless hunter, the winged wolf, the bane of nations. The most powerful man in a kingdom without kings.

Moneyboys is a novel that explores queer identity in the early 2000s, in the final few years of the height of the American boy band craze. The story’s protagonist must reconcile her own identity with what she views as two increasingly opposed goals: to make space for other queer people in turn-of-the-century Tinseltown and to continue getting hers. Her pursuit of these goals, her life outside of the fame machine, and the glossy, holographic, six-packed residents of the internet cause her to forge different versions of realness – an ability to define and embody an idea until it’s the truth – for herself, for the band of publicly-closeted and mostly-queer boys she manages, and for the American boy band consumer. Because this is still the turn of the millennium, she’s accompanied by hybrid intermissions of morning commute radio, basic cable news tabloids, and IM conversations – none of which makes it any easier for her to discover or remember what is truly real. Though this is, of course, what she must attempt to do.

Boy Band 104: it’s all supposed to look effortless, even though everyone involved knows that it’s not. It’s supposed to be like deodorant, there and pleasant, inoffensive – but deeply, unbendingly effective. And, as Jenna knows, nerds need deodorant. Boy bands are what this audience longs for – they’re emblematic of effort transforming into coolness, one of the few essences so pure it’s safely immeasurable. Where other execs had seen their audiences with small glows, maybe a pleasantly-bloated deltoid just south of each ear, Jenna had known to market to those who’d listen quietly, dance only in rooms devoid of other people. They’d twirl through parents’ basements, dodge other servers during late-night shifts, and sing along in a whisper, all part of an unnoticed network. Like Tom in his underwear but heavier, with more cellulite. Individually, nerds – people like Jenna, she’ll even admit it, OK? – aren’t the type of audience that the groomers and bodily arrangers of Hollywood want to think about. But together, it is them – the shy, the horny, the pale – that have blipped into a network that’s propelled the Moneyboys, by the start of ‘03, to chart spots so consistently above the ground that they come with a concierge. They consume, they pay, they spurt back data. They trail their hands across their bodies in bed as they think about the boys, the beautiful boys, to the point where their imagined selves become so removed from what’s real that soon, they’re just a vestige of their image of their favorite bandmate. Jenna has seen the chatrooms – the screencaps of 180p videos of the boys mid-lunge at concerts, circles and lines superimposed across their crotches in an effort to triangulate the exact shapes of their genitals. She knows she’s turned the Moneyboys into an entity nerds believe are worth more work than their jobs, their lives beyond the internet, their lives at all. And what’s even better is the nerds are quiet, appreciative – couldn’t cause an issue if they tried.

Or, at least, that’s what Jenna had thought until this morning, when the bespectacled spreadsheet jockeys from the CS program at USC left her with an accordion-folded printout that may weigh more than she does. It’s a report, delivered as promised, from The Thompson Lab. It says that the boys are perceived by audiences as more feminine, that they’ll be part of the origin point for a crisis of masculinity in the late naughties, that they’ll turn the nerd market into people who care about themselves before the boys they’ve idolized, and twist common advertising knowhow into a gnarled, useless display.

This Might Get Heavy is a collection of essays which explores intersecting themes of body image, mental illness, and sexual identity. Through these personal essays, Mayer explores and interrogates the societal norms and tendencies that have formed the shape into which she has forced herself both mentally and physically.

In essays such as “The Point System” and “Refraction,” Mayer uses memoir to depict the origins of her struggles with body image and disordered eating. “Tara’s Body Quiz and Answer Guide” and “How to Determine Your Sexuality: A Guide to Finding Your Letter in the Acronym” inhabit “hermit crab” forms to break through emotional barriers and question the need for conformity. Other essays, like “Green Tea and Giant Donuts” and “(Potentially Unwanted) Letters from Your Former Self,” act as thematic bridges that explore the ways body image and sexuality can influence one another, ultimately helping Mayer to unearth previously undiscovered pieces of her identity.

This Might Get Heavy uses several voices and forms to address and break away from the perceived expectations that have ruled the narrator’s life. It is both a reflection on the ways in which a body is built and a rebellion against the binding that holds these parts together.

Nuclear Option

Our bodies are weapons. Dangerous. The fat we contain is a bomb waiting to go off. The larger the bomb, the bigger the explosion. But if our wires cross, which way will the bomb detonate?

Forty-three-year-old, thirty-three-year-old, twenty-year old, thirteen-year-old woman/girl/body found on a running track, outside a weigh-in, in her kitchen, on the bathroom floor. Cause of death: starvation, disillusion, cardiac arrest, drowned in her own bile.

Our bodies are your weapons. You take my hips from me, sharpen bones to points that carve out the words “too wide”. You take my stomach, stretch it whip-thin with a crack that sounds like the word “fat.” You take my arms, carve down flab until they are hilt to your sword. I can’t remember these parts. When did they stop being part of me? When did you learn to wield them? And when there is nothing left of me, will that be enough for you?

Fat women everywhere, dead, like the radiation has spread and claimed them all for not being thin enough. Only the thinnest survive, and the curves will be forgotten about and no one will ever be fat again and America will be sane again because everyone’s body is the same.

Our bodies are our weapons. Comfort in this skin—with its folds, pockmarks, and sags—is an act of political violence. Celebrate every molecule: fat, muscle, blood. Be worshipped. Exist. Resist. Survive. Take back the weapons that they have stolen.

Transcendence ​is a novel that examines masculinity and self-acceptance in the modern era: How do we move on from wrongs done by others and our own mistakes?

A coming-of-age novel, Transcendence follows Cassiel, a young man in his mid-twenties, as he searches for his absent father and finds himself in a monastery where monks have strange abilities. He decides to learn meditation and find the source of his unhappiness through trials that test his discipline and faults. With the promise of enlightenment and learning what happened to his long-lost father, Cassiel completes each trial and comes closer to finding the answers to life within himself. His struggles reflect current concerns with technology, of feeling insignificant, addiction, depression, lust, jealousy, pride, and doubt, all in a setting that leaves behind our modern society’s obsession with consumption in exchange for a life focused on self-actualization. 

Cassiel hopes to overcome each trial with the resolve he finds in a life he never imagined was possible and find his truth in self-acceptance.

While perhaps more honest conversations about identity are occurring today than ever before, the violence infused into identity by millennia of conflict has barely been reduced, if affected at all. Indeed, identifying with a particular political party, religion, sexuality, etc. is often considered a declaration of war on those of differing beliefs and/or existence. The abuse and toxic perceptions created by such conflicts have only fed our culture’s escapist tendencies. Now, individuals often role play characters’ adventures and/or binge watch the lives of others more than they live their own, and the face—both figurative and literal—that individuals show on social media is partly, if not wholly, a persona. Seeking to escape reality, we have become a people skilled at substituting for every part of it, including ourselves.

The Morpheum Principle is a dystopian novel that aims to explore such issues by examining the nature of perception and how escapism/self-substitution can lead to self-erasure. Set in the city-state of Morpheum—a society that has banned the public expression of personal identities and mandated that its citizenry wear masks at all times—the narrative follows the lives of the twin sisters Dalia Lorenson and Anastasia Peddlebrook. Born to an abusive mother and a negligent father, Dalia seeks to dissociate herself from their parents’ and culture’s view of her blindness while Anastasia strives to break free from being their mother’s personal slave and another mindless citizen. Both take refuge in the personas allowed during Morphuem’s masquerades, and both must decide how much of themselves they are willing to sacrifice to escape the labels and lives that hold them.

Dalia wondered why black was the color of grief. Both glossy and matte black fabrics were used for the most elegant suits and dresses. Black striped the lionfish mask that the government had assigned her for soirees and the dress Anastasia made to match it, and their mother had called the outfit gaudy. Black was the color of night and, therefore, rest and relief from the day’s work. Anastasia had told her that black was the color of nothingness, that it was the color Dalia saw. There had certainly been times when her lack of sight angered, maybe even grieved her, but she perceived the color before her not as nothingness but more as the fabric of her reality. It was neither gaudy nor elegant, neither happy nor sad. If she had a word for it, it was stable. When she wore black, she matched the color of her world. There was a beautiful unity to that idea. Anastasia would like the balance of it.