Quelle Horreur

Jade is a seventeen year old half Indian outcast in the quickly gentrifying town of Proofrock. Her mother abandoned her and her father is abusive, but what she lacks in social ties and family bonds, she makes up in knowledge of slasher films. Horror movies have become a crutch for her to escape into when she doesn’t want to face the reality of her trauma. Fiction bleeds into reality, though, as she realizes that she can apply her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films to the deaths happening in her town.

First of all, shoutout to Pinterest and others for restricting the promotion of plantation weddings on their sites. The fact that they had to shows how perverse the memory of slavery is in this country for many. It takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to romanticize a place that meant death and subjugation for so many Black people.

In When the Reckoning Comes, Mira returns to a town she had fled ten years ago to go to a white friend’s plantation wedding. Tuh. We would cease to be friends with that invite, but maybe that’s just me. Upon her return, Mira finds the past she tried to flee from is resurfacing. She’s faced with the results of a childhood dare gone wrong, a haunted plantation that has been turned into a resort, and fact that the plantation’s ghosts—formerly enslaved people— are out for revenge against the descendants of their former torturers.

Another terrible wedding venue choice in a novella that Khaw describes as “a haunted house story where messy people make really bad decisions.” Someone thought it’d be a good idea to have a wedding at an abandoned Heian-era mansion that rests on the bones of a bride and her sacrifices. Couldn’t be me. Japanese folklore and aforementioned messiness converge for a truly horrifying read.

This collection of stories jumps from different points of view as it tells the story of migration in the American Southwest. The concepts of borders, gods, ghosts, colonization, revenge, and more are explored through deftly interwoven stories.

The Birth of a Nation is a hateful spell released upon the world by the sorcerer D.W. Griffith. To fight the Klan’s hellish plan for earth, Maryse Boudreaux and her magic sword join forces with two other Black women— a sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter— to fight the demons the Klan conjures. This novella mixes African folklore with American history and, naturally, commentary on racial animus. This is definitely for fans of the show Lovecraft Country.