This article first appeared in Dodgem Logic #2 in 2010, and is essentially a slightly longer rewrite of post-civ!, a collaboratively written introduction published by Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness, published in 2008.

Danielle Cain is Back!

Margaret Killjoy’s Danielle Cain book series is a queer, anarcho-punk fantasy that pits anarchist traveler Danielle Cain and her crew of demon-hunting friends against the spirits of the dead, unearthly cryptids, and the brutality of police. The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice is the long-awaited third installment and continues the series.

It’s Samhain, and Danielle and her friends are laying low in the wilderness Idaho, fresh off the road from their last adventure and hiding out from the magic feds. On Samhain the veil between the living and dead is at its thinnest. Danielle, Brynn, Vulture, Thursday, and Doomsday have to wait out the night, so they share stories around the campfire about magic—in its many forms. Listen with them as they encounter troll cults, murder faeries, and the horrors of the riot cops.

In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.

Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.

When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.

Margaret Killjoy’s Danielle Cain series is a dropkick-in-the-mouth anarcho-punk fantasy that pits traveling anarchist Danielle Cain against eternal spirits, hypocritical ideologues, and brutal, unfeeling officers of the law.

Now a nascent demon-hunting crew on the lam, Danielle and her friends arrive in a small town that contains a secret occult library run by anarchists and residents who claim to have come back from the dead. When Danielle and her crew investigate, they are put directly in the crosshairs of a necromancer’s wrath — whose actions threaten to trigger the apocalypse itself.

Danielle Cain is a queer punk rock traveller, jaded from a decade on the road. Searching for clues about her best friend’s mysterious and sudden suicide, she ventures to the squatter, utopian town of Freedom, Iowa. All is not well in Freedom, however: things went awry after the town’s residents summoned a protector spirit to serve as their judge and executioner.

Danielle shows up in time to witness the spirit—a blood-red, three-antlered deer—begin to turn on its summoners. Danielle and her new friends have to act fast if they’re going to save the town—or get out alive.