If Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out spurred a resurgence of Black horror in cinema, Tananarive Due’s novels have made a similar impact on literature.
The award-winning author, who wrote for Peele’s Paramount+ revival of The Twilight Zone and teaches a UCLA class inspired by his directorial debut, stands at the forefront of reputable Black horror and Afrofuturistic sci-fi writers who have reshaped the narrative with their worlds and words. From the Southern gothic Vodou rituals of The Good House to the creepy changeling child in Ghost Summer Stories, Due’s works possess a potency that lingers long after the last page. Currently, she’s co-authoring a new short story with her husband for The End of the World As We Know It, a new apocalyptic anthology based in the universe of Stephen King’s The Stand.
“Writing scary stories about people who are in these impossible situations really helps me feel less afraid in life,” says Due, who will lead a book discussion at the Beverly Theater on April 5, hosted by UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute. “I’m writing example after example of people who stand up to the unknown. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they don’t. But I think the point really is that we stand up.”
At home, Due had a great role model for that. Her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was an avid horror fan and a civil rights activist who’d fought her share of real-life monsters. Horror, in so many ways, had become a salve to her, “a way to treat racial trauma,” Due says.
“Those of us who’ve listened to our parents’ and grandparents’ stories we know about the horrors and the heartaches, and it’s not that we can completely erase them, or should,” she says. “But is there a way to take those memories and show them through a different prism?
“There were endings where people stood up and fought back. That’s the energy I want to bring to my work, that these characters are overcoming unbelievable obstacles, just as we do and have throughout history.”
In The Reformatory, she accomplishes just that. The 2023 novel, loosely based on the abuse at Florida’s Dozier School for Boys, took Due seven years to write, “and I think that speaks to what a scary project it was for me at every turn,” she says. After discovering her great uncle had died at the school in 1937, his body having been buried in an unmarked grave, Due wrestled with how to approach this painful piece of history.
Ultimately, she decided to rewrite it as an equally terrifying ghost story— with an empowered Black boy as the hero.
“Even with that fantasy element, there was so much reality infused in the story that it still was difficult to write,” Due says. “I didn’t want to sugarcoat the fact that this was a terribly violent place. But I also couldn’t stew in that violence. I had to find a way to give the story redemption and to give the story hope.”
It’s shocking to think these kinds of stories almost didn’t see the light of day. Before her 1995 debut novel The Between, Due predominantly focused on white characters and white stories.
“I started out as a child writing Black stories, but the more I was exposed to the canon in high school and college and graduate school, I began to gravitate toward erasing myself and my experiences from my own fiction,” she says.
The Between was a reclamation of Due’s own identity after years of trying to “find my way back to writing my own Blackness, writing Black women and even writing horror,” she says.
It also scared the hell out of her.
“I don’t write late at night anymore,” she laughs.
An Evening with Tananarive Due April 5, 7:30 p.m., free with RSVP, Beverly Theater, thebeverlytheater.com
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