As it’s Halloween month, I was pleased to receive this one for review.
From the publisher: “Jordan Peele, the visionary writer and director of Get Out, Us and Nope, curates this anthology of brand-new stories of Black horror. Exploring not only the terrors of the supernatural but also the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our world.
Featuring an introduction by Jordan Peele and an all-star roster of beloved writers and new voices, Out There Screaming is a masterclass in horror, and – like his spine-chilling films – its stories prey on everything we think we know about our world, and redefine what it means to be afraid. Very afraid . . .”
Now I will be honest – you know me! – but laying my cards on the table, I think I need to explain that I’m not a huge fan of Jordan’s movies, nor of his revamped Twilight Zone series. Don’t get me wrong, I thought they were generally OK, and I thought they often started well, but by the end of each film or episode they left me feeling that there was something missing or something that didn’t quite work.
I think that my main issue is that I often find the moral messages, as important as they are, unsubtly handled and too ‘in your face’. (This might be a British aversion, I accept.) It’s rather like that in my choice of horror reading too – less gore, more psychological terror for me!
With that in mind (and I realise that I may be the exception to this), it did make me a little cautious to try this collection – was it going to be unsubtle and too ‘in your face’ for me?
I am pleased to say though that these stories generally were not unsubtle – I enjoyed this much, much more than Peele’s other work.*
As any good story collection should be, it’s an engaging and eclectic mix. We have what I would notionally call traditional horror, as well as odd, quirky horror, atmospheric tales, exciting stories and stylistically challenging ones. We have stories set in the past, the present and even the future, which I liked.
Of the authors themselves, there’s a nice selection of names that I did recognise – Maurice Broaddus, P. Djèlí Clark, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi and Rebecca Roanhorse who generally deliver the goods. I particularly liked Rebecca Roanhorse’s story Eye and Tooth, about monster-hunters fighting monsters, which I would love to read more of, and Tananarive Due’s The Rider, about two freedom riders who take a bus journey in Alabama with something you would never want to (and which I read whilst travelling on a bus!) P. Djèlí Clark’s Hide & Seek, a tale of a family with magic, was as dark and as unpleasant as I thought it would be.
However, I found Nnedi Okorafor’s story Dark Home, of an Igbo woman standing up to a powerful spirit, a little disappointing. Whilst Nnedi is clearly writing about what she knows – her parents are of Igbo origin, I understand – I started to drift a little in the middle as I found I couldn’t engage with it. My least favourite story in the collection was the last one – Tochi Onyebuchi’s Origin Story was unusual in that it was in the form of a film or television script, which I’m never a fan of, personally. It is a very angry story about privileged white folk, which was so angry it verged on the rant-y and devalued itself in my eyes as a result. Before starting reading I thought that this was how the majority of the collection might have been and am pleased that it wasn’t.
What is most pleasing though is the amount of great stories written by writers who were unknown to me previously. And there’s a lot – Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Chesya Burke, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Justin C. Key, L. D. Lewis, Nicole D. Sconiers, Rion Amilcar Scott, Terence Taylor and Cadwell Turnbull. I usually find adding new writers to my reading lists is not a bad thing, as I like to try new ones, and there were a lot here I’d happily read more from. Of particular merit, I found Justin C. Key’s The Aesthete, of a future where Art is a societal value and humanoid AIs have to fight for their rights, and Terence Taylor’s The Happy Place both unusual and interesting science fiction stories, and also Ezra Claytan Daniels’s Pressure, which was a short but memorable story of a dysfunctional family. A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree, Nicole D. Sconiers’s story of two ghosts rooted to a lonely highway, was both amusing and sad, for as time goes on, they become increasingly divorced from the world of today.
I usually find that the sign of any good story collection is whether on balance I liked more stories than I disliked, to which Out There Screaming is a resounding success. The range of stories is nicely eclectic, the moralising not heavy-handed and valid. Many of these would make good episodes in an anthology television series, I think, although oddly perhaps not the one written as a script!
In summary, Out There Screaming is as effective a collection of contemporary horror writing as you will find. Embracing established writers and newcomers, I am not surprised to see this one as a finalist for the 2024 Locus Awards, and expect to see it on other award nomination lists this year. (In fact, the night before I type this the book has won the British Fantasy Award 2024 for Best Collection.) Recommended.
*Although I am aware that editor John Joseph Adams has been involved, whose anthologies I usually like. As Jordan Peele ‘curates’ this and writes an introduction, is it possible that Adams has done most of the heavy lifting here?
OUT THERE SCREAMING: An Anthology of New Black Horror
Edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams
Published by Picador, October 2024
ISBN: 978 103 5041 923
400 pages
