Jordan Peele is one of my absolute favorite directors and I think his horror films are some of the cleverest and most thoughtful contributions to the horror genre in recent years. So when I saw his name on an anthology of short horror fiction, I knew I needed to pick it up. Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams, came out last month, right on the heels of another great horror anthology centering marginalized voices: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. Judging by the quality of tales in these two collections, this diversity of voices is definitely here to stay in the horror genre!
Out There Screaming starts with a quite short, yet thoughtful foreword by Jordan Peele in which he compares horror to both the Sunken Place from his 2017 film Get Out and a type of medieval torture dungeon known as an oubliette, which comes from the French word to forget. But contradictorily, as the authors air out their own fears and personal Sunken Places in these stories, the anthology functions as an anti-oubliette by making sure that they are not forgotten. Peele’s foreword is followed by nineteen tales by different authors, ranging from recognized titans of the horror genre like Tananarive Due and P. Djèlí Clark, to authors better known for their science fiction and fantasy such as N.K. Jemison, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nnedi Okorafor, and Tochi Onyebuchi. There were also quite a few newer authors that I was not familiar with. The stories themselves cover a broad range of the horror genre, many with strong sci-fi or fantasy elements in them. There were new takes on classic narratives like alien invasions, climate apocalypses, and zombie attacks, as well as stories unlike any horror I’ve read before. Many of the stories drew on specific elements from African cultures or the cultures of the African diaspora. Some were set in the near future, while others took place during pivotal moments of Black American history. But each story in the collection highlights some element of the experience of being Black in today’s world.
Two of my favorite stories in the collection were both rather bleak apocalypse tales. “Pressure” by Ezra Claytan Daniels is set in a near future where an increasingly erratic climate serves as a subtle backdrop to an intricate family drama up until the moment when it all explodes … or perhaps implodes? The story is written in the second person, which forces the reader to closely identify with the protagonist, a Black man who risks the flash storms and pressure pockets that are now daily hazards of air travel to reunite with his two white cousins. As has been a pattern since childhood, he butts heads with the golden child Andrew, whose arrogance and casual racism always seem to undermine the narrator’s bids for connection. The growing tension between the cousins is reflected in a very literal increase in air pressure which is innocuously hinted at throughout the story until it culminates in a terrifying moment at the end. “Flicker” by L.D. Lewis depicts another sort of apocalypse by slow degrees. In this story the world is plagued by total blackouts in which darkness engulfs the world for increasingly long periods of time. Along with the chaos, plane crashes, and rampant looting that naturally accompany them, the blackouts also coincide with other strange glitches in reality that seem to imply that life as we know it is a simulation which now appears to be degrading. Kam, a young woman who loses her brother in the first blackout and tries to flee to safety with her friends after the second, is forced to face the hopelessness and inevitability of the end of the world.
As terrifying as these apocalypses can be, I think the scariest stories in the anthology are “Reckless Eyeballing” by N.K Jemison and “Your Happy Place” by Terence Taylor. “Reckless Eyeballing” is the very first story and much of its horror comes from the fact that it is told from the point of view of a deeply corrupt traffic cop whose internal monologue contains self-justifications for all sorts of heinous behavior. But while Carl rationalizes away any guilt he might feel, it manifests instead as a strange phenomenon he mistakenly believes to be a new superpower: the headlights on certain cars appear to him as uncannily realistic human eyes. Carl targets the owners of these cars on increasingly flimsy pretexts, convinced that he is being given some secret insight into their guilt. He remains in denial about his own crimes right to the end of the story, which climaxes in a stomach-twisting scene of visceral body horror. Guilt is also a central theme in “Your Happy Place,” though Taylor’s protagonist is much more sympathetic. It’s hard to talk about this one without completely spoiling it, so I’ll just say that it uses the framework similar to the Matrix films to explore the ethical issues of the for-profit prison industrial complex and how a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment allows prison labor to be exploited as a modern form of slavery.
If you love Jordan Peele’s horror films, you don’t want to miss out on this anthology of Black horror. You can find it on shelves now in your favorite local retailer or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know which story you found most terrifying in the comments!
Flicker sounds like a really unique take on a modern scientific conjecture on the nature of the universe. Pretty cool. Thanks for a great write up.