The Book Thread

[IthilanorStPete]

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.

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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.

For what it's worth, most of the people I've mentioned it to have been entirely on board with the tone of the marketing. And I definitely agree that it's a good thing to have, as you put it, proudly queer-normative media.

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

Yeah, HtN is a good bit less pulpy and more focused on psychological drama/horror. It's also where I really fell in love with the series; I thought GtN was pretty good, but HtN starts to dig into the thematics more, and I empathize a lot with Harrow.

Spoiler: Harrow the Ninth spoilers

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"soup-brained" - I see what you did there.