Some doors appear only when they are needed.
The Icicle Lounge is a linked collection of quiet, queer, magical stories about sanctuary, belonging, grief, love, and the strange ways we sometimes find our way home.
The Lounge appears where it is needed most: on frozen hillsides, beside lonely roads, on Atlantic shores, and even in the middle of summer when the winter is inside rather than out.
Inside wait North, Frost, Snow, and Ice — four figures bound into the strange mythology of the Lounge.
And always, somewhere, there is the fifth seat.
No one quite understands how the Lounge chooses whom to welcome. Some say the fifth seat is for whoever needs it next. Others say it appears only for those who are ready, or for the person carrying the heaviest winter. Perhaps all of those things are true. Perhaps none of them fully explain it.
Across the collection, strangers discover a place where they can breathe. A young man in 1950s Ireland finds sanctuary in a world where queer men must live carefully. A grieving man encounters the Lounge during a July heatwave. Two men return to one another across three winters. And Ciarán follows the mysterious frost-rimmed door through Wicklow, Kildare and Donegal before discovering what it means for the Lounge to appear close to home.
Illustrated throughout in a stained-glass-inspired visual style, The Icicle Lounge is a small book about refuge, recognition and the warmth we make for one another.
Come in from the cold.
Book details
Author: Rowan Q. Lorne
Publisher: Lismard Press
Format: Pocket Book paperback
Length: 126 pages
Interior: Full colour
Published: 9 August 2026
Price: €19.99
Available from: Lulu
About the book
The Icicle Lounge began with a poem about winter athletes, flirtation, and the simple gesture of removing a glove to offer a hand.
That gesture changed the story.
What began as observation became invitation: a willingness to feel the cold in order to offer warmth. From that image came the Lounge itself — a place built from longing, capable of recognising the winters people carry within them.
Themes
Queer belonging · sanctuary · magical realism · grief · love · chosen family · neurodivergence · Irish landscapes · winter · being seen
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