GloomCookie Books in Order

GloomCookie is Serena Valentino’s gothic soap opera comic about love, monsters, and misfit friends. It starts in the San Francisco club scene and slowly opens out into a wider, more fantastical world that feels like a fever dream version of goth culture.

At the center of the early volumes is Lex, a small, sharp-tongued regular at the local goth club who is trying to figure out what she wants from love and from herself. She is pulled between her complicated history with the brooding, gargoyle-like Damion, her feelings about her ex Max, and the toxic power games of Isabella, the self-crowned queen of the scene. Around them orbit friends and rivals like Sebastian, a sensitive poet who may be more than he seems, and Chrys, whose own secrets become more important as the series unfolds.

The book leans hard into melodrama in a deliberate way. Breakups and jealousies sit right beside prophecies, curses, and literal monsters under the bed. Over the collected volumes you meet living wax statues, witches with shifting loyalties, werewolves who cannot quite control what they are, and a boy wrestling with an enormous and dangerous magical gift. The tone slides from deadpan comedy to genuine heartbreak, often in the space of a few pages.

Each trade paperback collects a chunk of the ongoing story. GloomCookie Volume 1 introduces Lex, Damion, Isabella, and their circle, setting up the love triangles and supernatural hints that drive the series. Later collections like Broken Curses and The Carnival Wars push deeper into the mythology, revealing old bargains and long-standing feuds between carnivals, cabals, and creatures that have been manipulating events from the edges of the dance floor. The holiday special A Monster’s Christmas steps sideways to follow one of the series’ gentle giants on a lonely, oddly sweet quest to be noticed on Christmas Eve.

Underneath the black lipstick, elaborate outfits, and tongue-in-cheek goth references, GloomCookie is interested in the same things as a character-driven drama. It asks what happens when you build your identity around a scene, how you heal when first loves go wrong, and whether people who have hurt each other can change without losing what made them feel special in the first place.

If you come to the series from the Disney Villains novels, GloomCookie offers an earlier look at many of Valentino’s favorite ingredients: exquisite settings, prickly but vulnerable heroines, and a belief that even the most theatrical monsters have very human hearts. It is a good fit for readers who like their romances tangled, their jokes a little dark, and their magic stitched into coffee dates, club nights, and rainy city streets.