The Book Thread

[Ionathus]

So, they seriously made the tagline for Harrow the Ninth "The Necromancers are back and gayer than ever!", huh? I'm seriously tempted to burn this book without reading it.

The more reactions I get from people I recommend the Locked Tomb series to, the more annoyed I am with its marketing team. I feel like they have completely missed the point and the tone of the series and are chasing the entirely wrong audience. It's aggravating as hell to feel like I'm swimming upstream against a book's own marketing when I try to recommend it.

If you can stomach having that on the back cover₁, rest assured that Harrow the Ninth is even less pulpy than Gideon the Ninth. The necromancers are not, in fact, gayer than ever - if anything, there's less sexuality in Harrow the Ninth. Mostly because they've swapped the main character from a horny butch jock to a horrible little soup-brain goth goblin

1. Suggested approaches: A) fake dust jacket. B) Put tape over the tagline and say "oh yeah it tore" if anyone asks. C) Leave it as-is and if anyone ever asks about it, say in a very disappointed voice "they're not actually all that gay "

If I saw someone read it, I think I would mostly be curious about how it works. Like, is it just that the frequency of their gay activities is higher or is has the sheer quality of their gayness somehow increased?

Genuinely a good question. I think I initially read it as "the frequency of their gay activities is higher" but yeah, can you modify "gayness"? Can there be degrees of it? The Kinsey Institute probably has opinions on that one...

But yeah. It's fun to have proudly queer-normative fiction, and like I said before, I know several queer friends who were drawn in by the marketing, so it works for at least part of the target audience. But I think it also unnecessarily pigeonholes and misrepresents itself in the process.