Peculiar Tastes Books in Order

Peculiar Tastes is a shared-world project where several romance authors build stories around a magical Shadow Market filled with monsters, witches, demons, and other supernatural delights. Sierra Simone’s contribution, The Fae Queen’s Captive, is a dark sapphic romance that takes full advantage of the setting’s promise: dangerous bargains, overwhelming desire, and a heroine who is not as sensible as she likes to think.

The novella follows Janneth Carter, a grad student and archaeologist who has worked very hard to stop believing in magic. On Halloween night at a Scottish dig site, she stumbles across three strangers at an ancient grave and is promptly kidnapped into Faerie. There she meets the Stag Queen, a coldly beautiful and ruthless ruler who agrees to keep Janneth safe in exchange for her submission. Janneth offers to become the queen’s willing pet until it is time to return home, only to find that fae promises are rarely straightforward and that her own hunger for surrender may be as dangerous as anything lurking in the shadows.

Within the broader Peculiar Tastes universe, The Fae Queen’s Captive stands alongside other novellas about Gorgon assassins, death gods, mermen, sex druids, and haunted houses. They are linked by the Shadow Market, a once-a-year gathering where mortals and monsters mingle, but each story functions as a standalone. Simone’s entry leans hardest into faerie lore: stolen mortals, tricky wording, courts with their own inhuman logic, and erotic games where the stakes are as emotional as they are physical.

This page gives you the basic setup, content notes, and a sense of how much you need to know about the rest of Peculiar Tastes before diving in. (Answer: not much. You can happily start here.) If you enjoy the combination of sapphic dominance, folklore, and Simone’s usual high spice, you will also find suggestions here for what to try next, whether that is more Shadow Market stories or her other paranormal-leaning work like Sanguine.