Books published by Lethe Press

When Jim''s big brother Jack is released from prison, the brothers-along with their broken father and Jack''s menacing best friend-decide to charter an ocean fishing boat to celebrate Jack''s new freedom. Once the small crew is far out to sea, however, a mutant species rises from the deep abyssal darkness to terrorize the vessel and its occupants. As the horror of their situation becomes clear, the small group must find a way to fend off the attack and somehow, someway, return to safety; but as the strange parasitic creatures overrun them, they must use more extreme-and deadly-measures to survive.

In this debut collection of body-horror fairy tales and mid-apocalyptic Catholic cyberpunk, memory and myth, loss and age, these are the tools of storyteller Jarboe, a talent in the field of queer fabulism. Bodily autonomy and transformation, the importance of negative emotions, unhealthy relationships, and bad situations amidst the staggering and urgent question of how build and nurture meaning, love, and safety in a larger world/society that might not be "fixable." Winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror. 

The end of the road can be a haunted place. These genre-bending stories are set against a backdrop of sudden violence and profound regret, populated by characters whose bleak circumstances drive them to the point of no return...and sometimes even further. A high school track star faces a betrayal she cannot outrun. Two friends take a journey to find the dead alien hidden in the belly of a water tower. A high school senior learns about defiance on a school bus and witnesses a tragedy that he won''t soon forget. Six survivors in an underground bunker discuss the possibility of the apocalypse being an elaborate hoax. Brothers take a walk on the dark side of the wheat field and discover that some bonds are stronger than death. And in the title story, a former train conductor must confront the ghosts of his past while learning that it''s not the dead who haunt the living, but the other way around. Traversing the back roads of the south and beyond, these stories probe the boundaries of grief as well as imagination.

On a chilly, autumn night, on a lonely New Jersey highway, a teenager meets the boy of his dreams dressed in vintage clothing. When the boy vanishes, the teenager discovers he''s encountered the local legend, the ghost of a young man who died four decades earlier and has haunted that stretch of road ever since. Curious and smitten, the next evening the teen returns with his best friend. So begins an unusual story of boy-meets-ghost complete with Ouija boards, hours spent in cemeteries, scares and macabre humor. This new edition of the book, to celebrate its thirteenth anniversary, features an introduction by New York Times best-selling author Holly Black.

Small dreams can damn as much as full-blown nightmares, as proven in the short stories Laura Argiri has written in her debut collection, Guilty Parties. Small town life can host the bitterest gossip, and and small-minded folk can offer the cruelest taunts and regrettable deeds. A mother dwells on how broken her only daughter is, and whether her grandchild is all the crueler for it. A man''s obsession with bettering his lot in life to impress a woman develops a fascination instead for poisonous snakes. A young wife is confronted by her husband''s former boarding school roommate, a demented man whose misogyny has convinced him that she tore a rightful pairing apart. And literary agent lives for decades thinking that she caused a college classmate''s suicide, then encounters the woman at a party.

Underworld Dreams is Daniel Braum''s third short story collection of genre transcending, strange stories full of tension between the supernatural and psychological. Within the pages Braum''s multi-dimensional characters face dark underworlds and strange experiences that illuminate the human condition and world (we think) we know, heart-breaking tale of loss and grief, as well as eerie tales that thrill.

Jeff Mann is a defiant voice in Appalachian literature. His poems, provocative and beloved, are grounded in West Virginia''s mountains, his adoration for the region''s culture, and the frisson of passion between men. Redneck Bouquet, his new collection, has the poet seeking out sweet donuts and bringing home a lonely man, shucking flannels and boots. In another poem, Mann dwells on the scent of someone else in a lover''s moustache. These sumptuous verses reflect the commonplace and concupiscent joys of rural America.

Keith Banner's newest collection of stories and essays exposes how desire allows rural boys not to escape or ascend their lives but step beyond the need to buy into the dreams that middle class America has propagated. These are stories--some based on the realities of the author's life, some spun fiction--that offer what goes on in the hearts and minds of youths at once trapped by the demands of their Rust Belt neighborhoods and also freed by a welcome sense of being the outsider.

The Walls of Sparta is a marvelous new telling of an ancient story that offers fascinating insights into Sparta's martial culture and its use of the agoge, the institution that raised young men to be elite warriors often amid the exchange of amorous same-sex experiences. But outside forces encroach even here and the king must consider the threats of Thebes, as well as intrigue at home. Agesilaos was Sparta's most famous and most influential ruler. He assumed power at the apex of the city-state’s prosperity and military domination. Eros between men fascinates this king—his own lover puts him on the throne. But the king finds himself tempted by the young men in orbit around the throne, from a striking Persian boy to a protégé, the most beautiful man of his generation, who wages war nude versus awe-struck Thebans. Perhaps the walls of Sparta are not as high as the ones surrounding the king's heart.

Noted biblical scholar John McNeill (The Church and the Homosexual) offers further insight into the role of sex in the Bible and how the original viewpoints by Church Fathers has been twisted by the Catholic Church over the years. This book also offers a festschrift by current scholars in honor of McNeill. John McNeill was co-founder of the New York City chapter of Dignity, a group for Catholic gays and lesbians. For over twenty-five years, he has been active in a ministry to gay Christians through retreats, workshops, lectures, publications, etc. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Human Rights Campaign Lifetime Achievement Award.

This collection from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of Transcendent 2 offers plenty of thrills - and bonus tentacles - for readers of LGBTQ-focused speculative literature. The stories range from magical space opera to cheerful body horror and historical fantasy, always with a sense of hope amid adversity. The mystical and magical merge with the scientific and technological: sacred texts gain new interpretations in the light of nuclear physics, and people save a forest with computer science. Cephalopods build alliances and research their past, Jewish shapeshifters speak to extraterrestrial planetminds, and Hungarian horse archers summon ancient terrors.

Two-time Lambda Literary and four-time National Leather Association award-winning author Jeff Mann's newest collection of personal essays speaks out against homophobia and the outdated ideas of masculinity demanded by life in Appalachia and the American South. Mann's writings will arouse, amuse, and provoke. Whether remarking on treating a Narcissus to dinner in New Orleans, mulling over the decision to purchase a hand gun because of the current political clime, or fantasizing with his husband over a pair of burly house painters lingering over stiff brushes, Mann's bold statements are gruff insights about what gay life is--and should be--below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Originally published in 1962, John D. Keefauver''s Tormented Virgin is one of a thousand pulp novels that sought to entice readers with a salacious story. The novel follows Gene through his romance with the young and attractive Faye, as well as his attraction to Mickey--the lesbian who is attempting to seduce Faye--and also Mark, his own best friend. This confusion of gender and attraction creates a subversively queer milieu for a novel. Keefauver''s novel is not only emblematic of mid-20th-century mainstream society''s view of bisexuality, but a growing awareness of sexual energy and the struggle of queer individuals in a ''''new America.'''' Lethe Press is proud to release this pulp novel, rescued from literary oblivion primarily for its provocative character, with a foreword by scholar Lee Mandelo and an afterword by author Scott Nicolay. Featuring new artwork by modern pulp master James O''Barr. 

From pirates, politicians, and pornographers to starlets, serial killers, and saints, Gay a Day showcases a multicultural mosaic of real-life stories. Each day features the biography of a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or intersex person of note: their accomplishments, their loves, their tragedies, and their times. With every page you turn, you'll find beautiful heroics, chilling horrors, and secret histories that will scandalize you, and by the end of the year you'll be prouder than ever. A great read for people interested in the rich yet often hidden past of queer folk.

Twelve women. Twelve horrors disguised as love. In Anya Martin's new collection of horror tales: a teenage girl faces the consequences of wishing her dog could live forever; a romantic college student wakes a gargoyle in Paris; and a lonely woman finds her house infested with insects. History's darker depths are delved as an American jazz singer confronts her lover who has committed terrible war crimes as he descends into madness in post-WW2 Germany; and a couple experiences H.P. Lovecraft's Resonator machine via found footage from the Velvet Underground. In the publisher's favorite tale: Actress Elsa Lanchester reveals the true story of Bride of Frankenstein involving the preserved brain of Karl Marx's daughter in 1923 London.

During the last desperate days of the Vietnam War, American soldier Israel Broussard is assigned to a secret CIA PSYOP far behind enemy lines meant to drive terror into the heart of the North Vietnamese and end an unwinnable war. When the mission goes sideways, Broussard is plunged into a nightmare that he soon finds he is unable to escape, dragging a remnant of that night in the Laotian wilderness with him no matter how far he runs.Five years later, too damaged to return home and holed up in the slums of Bangkok, where he battles sleep, guilt, and a creeping sense of madness, Broussard discovers that he must journey back to the jungles of Laos in an attempt to set things right and reclaim what is left of his life. A fever dream with a Benzedrine chaser, I Am The River provides a daring, often surreal examination of the Vietnam War and the days after it, burrowing down past the bullets and battlefields to discover the lingering horror of warfare, the human consequences of organized violence, and the lasting effects of trauma on the psyche, and the soul.

In Forget the Sleepless Shores readers should expect to be captivated by many ghosts and spirits who inhabit brine, some from tears of heartache and loss, some from strange bodies of water, not necessarily found on the map but definitely discovered through charting a course though the perilous straits of author Taaffe's imagination, which is eerie and queer (by every definition of the word).

Eerie and unnerving events are welcome reads for horror and weird fiction aficionados, and Kurt Fawver's new collection does not fail to deliver. A group of work-study students grows obsessed with a particular, otherworldly room at the university library. A monster's mother wants her to assume a traditional life. A mysterious calling haunts an elderly man at a nursing home. And strange and macabre Halloween traditions draw a writer to a remote Pennsylvania town.

The stories in this year's selection are sometimes grim, sometimes cheerful, sometimes quirky—but always full of emotion. Editor Takács has assembled a wide range of non-cis experiences: from an intergalactic art heist to the everyday life of a trans woman through the lens of horror movies; non-binary parenting in the far future, to a unique method of traveling back to the past. Steampunk, ghosts, even deities, all can be found in these stories that show how transness can relate to and subvert so many themes at the heart of speculative fiction. The introduction also includes a section on year-to-year changes in transgender SFF, and assembled longer-form trans highlights.

The eleventh and final volume in the series that offered readers the best gay-themed stories of the strange, uncanny, and fantastical! Work by such acclaimed authors as Richard Bowes, Sam J. Miller, Sean Eads, and John Chu. A library of all the books never written before their authors passed away; young men hiding their pain through weird body modifications; Captain Hook finally meets the Greek god Pan; even Oscar Wilde himself makes an appearance in this anthology by Lambda Literary Award-winning editor Steve Berman.

Mick Harris is disillusioned and disconnected from the world. Having come out after his glory days as the songwriter/bass player for metal act, Palace, he's all but given up on his dream of having a meaningful relationship, of leading a "normal," life. When a stranger calls to inform him that an old flame has died, leaving Mick's daughter alone in a hostile small Southern town, he sees an opportunity to build a meaningful connection with the girl. Of course, she is resistant to meeting her father. In fact, she hates him for having been absent her entire life, but the people close to her are dying horribly.

In the summer of 1955, sixteen-year-old Tommy Cadigan finds himself helpless in the face of desire, especially when the man that wears the face is his high school swimming coach, a young Korean War veteran who is still recovering from receiving a "blue ticket" discharging him from the military because of his homosexuality. Unsure if his infatuation is returned, Tommy distracts himself with the attention of a local bully, who hustles older men at night besides a decrepit zoo in Boise's park. Tommy soon finds himself in the midst of a scandal that threatens to ignite the entire town...and his life will never be the same.