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We Burn Beautiful: The Complete Collection
A love story spanning twenty-plus years. In this special edition, experience Kent and Gray's story from beginning to end.
Included in this
The Gospel According to Gray Collins
Gray was thirteen when the boy with tangled hair entered his life, bringing with him chaos and confusion, and the cutest butt this side of the border. Between passing notes at school, spending four nights a week together at church, and sharing their weekends, Kent consumed Gray's life. They were once inseparable, and until recently, Gray thought they always would be. Now, things have changed. Now, Kent's got a girlfriend. The future that once burned so beautifully in the distance is burning down to ash, and no matter how hard Gray tries, he can’t put out the flames.
We Burn Beautiful
Kent Fox is not okay. Thanks to a botched selfie swap, thousands of his colleagues have borne witness to a photo of his sock-covered crotch. Branded a professional pariah, he's had to move home with his mother, and the only job the 38-year-old, over-the-top, former executive can land is stocking shelves at a grocery store. To make matters worse, his new boss is none other than his ex-gay ex-boyfriend. Fabulous. Just freaking fabulous.
The Sleepover
One night. It would only be one night. An evening to say goodbye to the boy Gray lost and the man who returned. With a ring in his pocket and a breaking heart in his chest, Gray invites Kent for one final Saturday night sleepover to rival the ones they shared as children. There will be Spice Girls. There will be merriment. There will be no cuddling.
An Unhinged Wedding
A wedding (and honeymoon) twenty years in the making.
Included in this
The Gospel According to Gray Collins
Gray was thirteen when the boy with tangled hair entered his life, bringing with him chaos and confusion, and the cutest butt this side of the border. Between passing notes at school, spending four nights a week together at church, and sharing their weekends, Kent consumed Gray's life. They were once inseparable, and until recently, Gray thought they always would be. Now, things have changed. Now, Kent's got a girlfriend. The future that once burned so beautifully in the distance is burning down to ash, and no matter how hard Gray tries, he can’t put out the flames.
We Burn Beautiful
Kent Fox is not okay. Thanks to a botched selfie swap, thousands of his colleagues have borne witness to a photo of his sock-covered crotch. Branded a professional pariah, he's had to move home with his mother, and the only job the 38-year-old, over-the-top, former executive can land is stocking shelves at a grocery store. To make matters worse, his new boss is none other than his ex-gay ex-boyfriend. Fabulous. Just freaking fabulous.
The Sleepover
One night. It would only be one night. An evening to say goodbye to the boy Gray lost and the man who returned. With a ring in his pocket and a breaking heart in his chest, Gray invites Kent for one final Saturday night sleepover to rival the ones they shared as children. There will be Spice Girls. There will be merriment. There will be no cuddling.
An Unhinged Wedding
A wedding (and honeymoon) twenty years in the making.
505 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 15, 2025
About the author
Lance Lansdale
14 books214 followersLance Lansdale is the author of F**k, Marry, Kill Me, Daddy. He's a sucker for gay romance and devours far more audiobooks than one ought. Texan by blood (Louisianan by circumstance), his stories take place in small towns with quirky side characters.
You can email him at lancelansdalewrites@gmail.com or visit his website at www.lancelansdale.com
You can email him at lancelansdalewrites@gmail.com or visit his website at www.lancelansdale.com
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 13, 2025
Such a fabulous read. This book made me cry. I could relate to Kent’s character to heavily in this book. The religious trauma that he went through to being kicked out and alienated from family because of who I am as a Trans person. This book really hit home. Kent and Gray’s story is one of so much love clouded in fear and judgment from losing family because of being who you are and trying to change yourself to fit in. Such a great read. I will recommend it to friends.
October 15, 2025
I don’t typically gravitate toward second chance romance, but this one is 5 stars through and through. The prequel has a good mix of lightheartedness watching two boys grow up and fall in love and total emotional devastation when everything blows up leading to our boys breaking up. It left me completely wrecked!
We Burn Beautiful picks up 20 years after those horrific events and Kent had to move back home and face Gray. Gray is stubbornly hanging on to his identity as a Christian straight man and Kent is out and proud about it. They slowly try to build a friendship but the romantic and sexual chemistry is very much alive between them. They fight and work through their trauma and come out the other side being who they were always meant to be to each other. Half- Pint and Two Liter
This is much more emotionally complex than many of Lance’s other books and this so worth the read. It messy, funny, heartbreaking and eventually heartwarming! TW for religious trauma, homophobia and a hate crime that results in some PTSD symptoms.
We Burn Beautiful picks up 20 years after those horrific events and Kent had to move back home and face Gray. Gray is stubbornly hanging on to his identity as a Christian straight man and Kent is out and proud about it. They slowly try to build a friendship but the romantic and sexual chemistry is very much alive between them. They fight and work through their trauma and come out the other side being who they were always meant to be to each other. Half- Pint and Two Liter
This is much more emotionally complex than many of Lance’s other books and this so worth the read. It messy, funny, heartbreaking and eventually heartwarming! TW for religious trauma, homophobia and a hate crime that results in some PTSD symptoms.
October 15, 2025
Gray & Kent are so traumatically beautiful! Author Lance Lansdale put his heart & soul into these characters! And it shows! My heart is truly and completely overwhelmed w/ emotions. I read Lance's debut, We Burn Beautiful, last year. So I was already in love w/ these precious characters. Add in the prequel novella of Gray's pov & I didn't think I could love him any more than I already did, but of course Lance delved deeper into Gray's backstory, and it just made me love him even more. This story is loosely based on the author's own personal experiences, which is absolutely heartbreaking. But the bravery & honesty he shares with us through his characters are so beautiful. And it comes across on every page. I'm THRILLED that Lance combined the two books into one complete version.
October 29, 2025
So good!! This is emotional but even with all the emotion and heavy stuff, there's still a lot of sweet, lighthearted, and funny moments. Seriously, Lance is always able to inject the perfect amount of humor into everything and while that didn't make me cry any less while reading this, the laughs balanced out the tears!
January 23, 2026
I actually tried to read We Burn Beautiful a year ago, and ended up stopping halfway through (after the first book which is the Gospel by Gray). Not because it was bad, but because the timing was completely wrong for me. Emotionally, I just couldn’t go there at that point. I’m really glad I gave it another chance later and didn’t let that first attempt define the book for me, because it deserved more than that.
I’ll say this upfront: I usually don’t love books that start when the characters are kids. It’s just not a trope I naturally connect with. But somehow, here, it worked for me. We meet the characters as children in a small town full of suffocating homophobia, and the way they fall in love feels so gentle and restrained. It’s innocent, soft, and honestly very moving. The kind of love that exists in glances and unsaid things. And then they’re forced apart, and it hurts.
When we meet them again in their forties, it truly feels like a second-chance romance in the purest sense. That said, this is also where I struggled a bit. The time gap is huge, decades, and while I understood what the story was aiming for emotionally, I found myself wanting more friction when they reunited. Given how painful and harsh their breakup was, I expected more anger, more messiness, more unresolved feelings crashing into each other. I wanted more time spent on the emotional fallout, more space for resentment, and yes, probably more groveling before things came back together.
There’s also something else that might just be very personal to me. They fall in love as teenagers, and then reconnect in their forties with feelings that seem almost unchanged. But love at sixteen and love at forty don’t feel the same to me, and they shouldn’t. People grow, mature, outgrow things, or at least understand them differently. I wanted more reflection on that, more exploration of how that early love evolved, or why it didn’t fade. Without that, it sometimes felt like an emotional leap the story asked me to make a bit too quickly.
All that said, the writing itself is genuinely beautiful. The pacing works, the emotions land, and you really do feel like you’re living inside these characters’ lives rather than just watching them from the outside. You feel their longing, their regret, their tenderness. There’s a quiet weight to the story that stayed with me.
I’m giving this four stars, not because it disappointed me, but because I wanted just a little more depth in a few key emotional places. Still, it’s a powerful, heartfelt book, and absolutely one I’d recommend.
I’ll say this upfront: I usually don’t love books that start when the characters are kids. It’s just not a trope I naturally connect with. But somehow, here, it worked for me. We meet the characters as children in a small town full of suffocating homophobia, and the way they fall in love feels so gentle and restrained. It’s innocent, soft, and honestly very moving. The kind of love that exists in glances and unsaid things. And then they’re forced apart, and it hurts.
When we meet them again in their forties, it truly feels like a second-chance romance in the purest sense. That said, this is also where I struggled a bit. The time gap is huge, decades, and while I understood what the story was aiming for emotionally, I found myself wanting more friction when they reunited. Given how painful and harsh their breakup was, I expected more anger, more messiness, more unresolved feelings crashing into each other. I wanted more time spent on the emotional fallout, more space for resentment, and yes, probably more groveling before things came back together.
There’s also something else that might just be very personal to me. They fall in love as teenagers, and then reconnect in their forties with feelings that seem almost unchanged. But love at sixteen and love at forty don’t feel the same to me, and they shouldn’t. People grow, mature, outgrow things, or at least understand them differently. I wanted more reflection on that, more exploration of how that early love evolved, or why it didn’t fade. Without that, it sometimes felt like an emotional leap the story asked me to make a bit too quickly.
All that said, the writing itself is genuinely beautiful. The pacing works, the emotions land, and you really do feel like you’re living inside these characters’ lives rather than just watching them from the outside. You feel their longing, their regret, their tenderness. There’s a quiet weight to the story that stayed with me.
I’m giving this four stars, not because it disappointed me, but because I wanted just a little more depth in a few key emotional places. Still, it’s a powerful, heartfelt book, and absolutely one I’d recommend.
January 31, 2026
🌶️.5
4.25 ⭐
The Gospel According to Gray Collins: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Purely storywise I loved this, well, as much as you can love a heart breaking story about two young gay boys who fall in love in a small bigoted town. I cried quite a few times, and it was at times difficult to read. I was glad I read this first and not in the order the books came out. It would've been hard to go from the book with the happy ending (WBB) to this sad as fuck prequel.
We burn beautiful: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐.5
This book was everything I expected from a Lance Lansdale book and I loved it! Even in books with serious topics like this one, there's a certain level of unhinged/ sass every character has that is so typically Lance! I can imagine it takes some getting used to, but as someone who started with F** marry kill me daddy, this was perfect! I cried several times, was mad at those two idiots several times more and cried some more happy tears when they finally pulled their heads out of their asses. All in all, a great read!
Mind your triggers! These books have bigoted towns people, religious trauma, homophobia and one homophobic assault, as well as a Lavender relationship.
4.25 ⭐
The Gospel According to Gray Collins: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Purely storywise I loved this, well, as much as you can love a heart breaking story about two young gay boys who fall in love in a small bigoted town. I cried quite a few times, and it was at times difficult to read. I was glad I read this first and not in the order the books came out. It would've been hard to go from the book with the happy ending (WBB) to this sad as fuck prequel.
We burn beautiful: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐.5
This book was everything I expected from a Lance Lansdale book and I loved it! Even in books with serious topics like this one, there's a certain level of unhinged/ sass every character has that is so typically Lance! I can imagine it takes some getting used to, but as someone who started with F** marry kill me daddy, this was perfect! I cried several times, was mad at those two idiots several times more and cried some more happy tears when they finally pulled their heads out of their asses. All in all, a great read!
Mind your triggers! These books have bigoted towns people, religious trauma, homophobia and one homophobic assault, as well as a Lavender relationship.
October 13, 2025
I adore this book; it's a great read now that everything is together in one book. Finally, we get to see the whole story of Kent and Gray from when they first meet as teenagers, going from friends to something more, and the whole journey they have to take to get to where they need to be.
Kent and Gray are very special to me. I share certain traumas with one of the characters, and I know what it's like to be there. You cry, you laugh, you suffer, you feel joy...
From the very first chapter, you want to wrap them up in blankets so that nothing bad happens to them.
A highly recommended read.
Kent and Gray are very special to me. I share certain traumas with one of the characters, and I know what it's like to be there. You cry, you laugh, you suffer, you feel joy...
From the very first chapter, you want to wrap them up in blankets so that nothing bad happens to them.
A highly recommended read.
June 21, 2026
Their story is a lot of what I want in a romance book. Starts at childhood, has a lot of angst, a good amount of open communication, and religious guilt. And the author is funny as fuck while writing some of the most heartfelt shit I’ve read in a while.
March 30, 2026
All the emotions
I loved Gray and Kent in the Murder Daddy series, and so glad I decided to start at the beginning. An amazing story with all the feels. Highly recommend.
I loved Gray and Kent in the Murder Daddy series, and so glad I decided to start at the beginning. An amazing story with all the feels. Highly recommend.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews