For all their wit and invention, what might stand out most in TJ Klune’s bestselling queer fantasies is the care with which the author invites readers in. Those invitations are to join in fantastic adventures; to witness tender, affirming romances that ignite between male characters—and, on occasion, a robot; and to nest with the found families that populate his books.
There are nourishing teatimes and jazz-record listening sessions in The House in the Cerulean Sea and its sequel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea. There are screenings of Fred Astaire musicals with a Roomba in the posthuman future of In the Lives of Puppets. There’s sparkling lunchtime banter between teens, some secretly superpowered, in the Extraordinaries series. And there’s skipping stones and games of Old Maid in his latest, The Bones Beneath My Skin (originally self-published in 2018 and coming in February from Tor), a paranormal on-the-run thriller complete with black helicopters, government secrets, and a young girl who is much more than she seems.
Klune’s books offer readers these moments because he still remembers the heartening jolt he felt when a book first invited him in. “The very first book I ever read with queer people in it was given to me by my librarian after I came out to her,” Klune says via Zoom from his cabin in the Cascade Mountains region of Washington State. The book: Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner, a tragic gay love story published in 1974.
Klune loved—and loves—the book, counting a signed first edition as a prized possession. His own novels, though, tend to be more optimistic, emphasizing tenderness, connection, and the power of openhearted people (or werewolves or amorphous green blobs) to better the world. “I do what I do because I know that even now there are kids like I was out there, young people in rural settings,” he says, “and I want to make sure that they’re seen too—and that they get to see themselves in books.” As readers of Green Creek—Klune’s spicier, often heartrending werewolf romance series—can attest, Klune understands the power of being invited into a pack.
Still, for all the warmth and tenderness of his books, Klune prefers not to categorize them as cozy, a term that implies low stakes. “People have called In the Lives of Puppets cozy, but that deals with the genocide of the entire human race,” says Klune, who also resists being saddled with expectations. “I don’t want to give people the idea that this is all I’m going to write for the rest of my career. I want to write a queer western. I want to write a queer space opera. I want to do this. I want to do that. If people care enough about me after I’m gone, maybe they’ll look back at this point in my life and think, this is when he loved people. He loved seeing characters come together and do things. And then maybe the next part of my career is going to be like, Well, TJ Klune really just wanted to kill off everybody.”
Born in Roseburg, Ore., in 1982, Klune—who doesn’t speak publicly about his family—grew up poor on his grandmother’s farm, where life as a queer and effeminate kid with ADHD wasn’t easy. He seized on storytelling as an escape early on, and his family’s move to Tucson, Ariz., with its more diverse population, felt—when he was 16—something like his first steps into a wider world. From there, Klune carved his own path, leaving community college after one semester, working as an insurance claims adjuster in Virginia, and writing as much as possible.
Impishly animated behind his signature spectacles, Klune speaks quickly, with passion and fierce focus, whether he’s landing a joke, making a point, or doing both at once. His words emerge at such speed, and in such well-shaped sentences, that conversation with him somewhat demystifies his remarkable productivity as an author. Since his 2011 debut—Bear, Otter, and the Kid—Klune has published 27 novels, including 2014’s haunted small-town romance Into This River I Drown, which won a Lambda Literary Award. Many of his books were published by Dreamspinner Press, a Florida indie specializing in queer romances; others were self-published under his own BOATK Books imprint.
Despite his success and productivity, Klune wasn’t making a living as a writer. He describes his decade in insurance as “cubicle hell” and recalls being devastated, one day, when a company “bigwig” told him, “You are very good at insurance.”
“That’s not what I wanted to be good at,” Klune says. The next week, he put in his notice. “I wanted to be good at something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. So, I took that chance.”
The gamble paid off. Klune went full-time as a writer in 2016 and signed on with Tor in 2018. In 2021, Tor published The House in the Cerulean Sea, a commercial breakthrough leading to acclaim, and bigger audiences. And, in 2022, Tor announced a deal for nine Klune titles, including reprints of four books —the complete Green Creek series— first published by Dreamspinner, and The Bones Beneath My Skin, first published by BOATK. “TJ is an outrageous talent,” says Ali Fisher, executive editor at Tor. “It’s a rare storyteller who can have you experiencing their stories so fully in your body and, at the same time, sending your mind to another world entirely.”
And if the plot of The Bones Beneath My Skin sounds more conventional than most Klune novels, on the page it’s all him: the young female protagonist is named Artemis Darth Vader, the male-male romance is both sweet and sexy, and before the action hits, Klune conjures a lovely, extended idyll, with his characters hiding out in a remote cabin and learning how to trust one another.
That cabin sounds a lot like the one where Klune currently lives. And like Artemis Darth Vader and her companions, he relishes nesting but won’t back down from a fight. He’s fiercely outspoken about LGBTQ+ rights and the current surge in book banning. Touring the nation with Somewhere Beyond the Sea, Klune addressed audiences in theaters rather than bookshops—offering that all important invitation to hundreds at a time—and delivered barnstorming speeches about trans rights and standing up for love.
“So many people see their rights being stripped away piece by piece,” he says. “They see segments of the population, whether it be BIPOC people, whether it be LGBTQIA people, being targeted, and they’re not going to stand for it. If adults think that all these young people are so impressionable and that they need to be protected, why does nobody ask them what they think?”
