Small town.
Big screams.
Very gay
monsters.

The culprit?
Les Beans.

Leslie “Les” Beans writes the kind of books you’d have hidden inside your math textbook at twelve, if that book had been a good deal gayer and rated for adults. She grew up on Goosebumps, Animorphs, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Her books are campy, spooky and unapologetically spicy: small-town monster stories where the gossip is deadlier than the creatures and every chapter ends on a cliffhanger. The women are grown, the slow burns do eventually catch, and the love scenes would get her banned from the Scholastic Book Fair for life. If you’ve ever wanted a sapphic creature feature with a happily ever after, you’re in the right place.

Leslie lives in Upstate New York with her wife, close enough to the fictional town of Lavender Hollow to have suspicions about the neighbors. She drives a Subaru and owns more flannel than any one woman needs, which makes her a hypocrite about half her book titles and an expert on all of them.