2023 has, so far, been a year full of innovative and mind-bending anthologies, and Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror is one of the best. With an incredible list of contributors, and Jordan Peele as editor, this collection is meant to be savored and celebrated. I asked contributors to the anthology to answer a few questions about the collection and the literary moment it represents. Their answers have helped me realize that the “moment” that I’m thinking of is as more about gatekeeping than it is about the availability of great fiction. Thanks so much to Cadwell Turnbull, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tochi Onyebuchi for their thoughtful and powerful contributions to one of the most important ongoing conversations of genre happening today.
Cadwell Turnbull:
What does incorporating the supernatural bring to stories of social justice, and vice versa?
I think for a lot of people of color, and marginalized folk in general, systems of oppression can feel like forces. There’s a sense of things happening above our heads, or beneath our feet, or moving invisibly through our communities. In ways it can feel supernatural even though we know these forms of oppression have very natural, nameable sources. But that surreal feeling remains, lingering long after incidents of injustice. The supernatural can be a good way to talk about not just the reality, but that surreal experience.
On the other hand, I think supernatural elements create distance. Strangely, if you can personify these experiences as a monster, then it feels like it can be vanquished. So often real world injustice doesn’t feel that way.
What do you think is behind the Black Horror Renaissance, and what do you want to see more of in horror going forward?
First, we’d have to discuss what we mean by a renaissance. Many authors in this collection have been writing or dabbling in horror for decades, writers like Tananarive Due and Nalo Hopkinson and Maurice Broaddus. And writers like Roanhorse or Jemisin, even when they aren’t writing horor (and they often are), you can still see the horrific in their work. It is in the air of the narrative.
I think what has happened is that there’s finally a broader audience coming to that work due to our current discussions around antiracism and diversifying what we read. And there’s more space being made for black writers wanting to work in the genre that have come out of similar antiracist discussions in the industry. The other ingredient is a well-timed flash point, a series of popular successes in the genre building off each other. Films like Get Out, Us, and Nope (my personal favorite), television shows like Atlanta, Swarm, or I May Destroy You, combine elements of horror, humor, surrealism, and social justice. They can be discussed on that meta level but are also just worth watching. That kind of success proves what was already obvious to authors and creatives working in the genre: there’s a hunger for these stories.
What I want to see is just more of what I’m already seeing. More space at the table. More stories that are about the range of black experience.
Nalo Hopkinson:
What does incorporating the supernatural bring to stories of social justice, and vice versa?
NH: It’s what storytellers have done since the beginning of human time. Think of the oldest folk tales, and how many of them incorporate the supernatural into stories of morality and justice. Perhaps the supernatural is a kind of intensifier which allows the audience to perceive actions and their consequences writ large.
What do you think is behind the Black Horror Renaissance, and what do you want to see more of in horror going forward?
NH: Is there a Renaissance, though? Or is it greater visibility and opportunity? There have always been Black fans of horror. It was just rare to find Black stories featuring Black characters; harder to find Black main characters. When we were depicted, we were often there to die, all too frequently sacrificing ourselves so that the white leads could live; we were a trope, not fleshed out characters. The supernatural elements tended to come from European-originated folklore. That’s changing. As to what I want to see more of in horror, I have a secret; I can barely watch or read horror; it -scares- me! Before I go to see a Jordan Peele film, I have to search out all the spoilers I can find so I can stand to stay in the theatre. But the weird thing is, I can write horror just fine. Something to do with breathing while Black, perhaps?
Tochi Onyebuchi:
What does incorporating the supernatural bring to stories of social justice, and vice versa?
Speculative fiction, like most other genres, has a particular toolkit of elements and tropes that can be brought out to build something that can house a reality, a truth. Just like crime novels often double as social novels, ghosts/wraiths/haints can tell us about ourselves in a way that a literary social realist novel may not be built to. In some ways, the fight for social justice in America is a horror story, gorier and more terrifying than much of the fiction I’ve read in any genre. Horror floats the possibility that if your dilapidated under-funded community feels haunted, perhaps it is. If the malevolent white cop, blue-and-reds flashing over his face at night, seems to carry an aspect of the demoniac, maybe it’s because that is how cops are designed. The supernatural can tell us, if we ever feel like we’re losing our minds, that perhaps we’re right to think what we think and see what we see, that forces beyond our ken are ever buffeting us.
What do you think is behind the Black Horror Renaissance, and what do you want to see more of in horror going forward?
I think some of it comes down to the writers; plenty of us felt inspired by Candyman and, more recently, Get Out. But I think, more importantly, Black horror writers (who’d been toiling all the while, crafting tales grounded in their experiences and demographics) felt validated by those successful efforts, and the gatekeepers turned the key in the lock, opened the door, and let us in. What I’d like to see more of in horror is what Faulkner grokked so adroitly, namely the madness, powered by unresolved guilt, that afflicts white Americans in the aftermath of chattel slavery’s abolition. What I hope to see more of—not just in Black horror, but in horror, in general—is the villainy of whiteness. For better or for worse, whether or not we see that will depend on those very same alabaster gatekeepers.
***
