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Let's Play White
White brings with it dreams of respect, of wealth, of simply being treated as a human being. It's the one thing Walter will never be. But what if he could play white, the way so many others seem to do? Would it bring him privilege or simply deny the pain? The title story in this collection asks those questions, and then moves on to challenge notions of race, privilege, personal choice, and even life and death with equal vigor. From the spectrum spanning despair and hope in "What She Saw When They Flew Away" to the stark weave of personal struggles in "Chocolate Park," Let's Play White speaks with the voices of the overlooked and unheard. "I Make People Do Bad Things" shines a metaphysical light on Harlem's most notorious historical madame, and then, with a deft twist into melancholic humor, "Cue: Change" brings a zombie-esque apocalypse, possibly for the betterment of all mankind.
200 pages, Paperback
First published April 23, 2011
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August 29, 2016
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This short story collection rocked my socks off. Each story had enough real world and fantastical elements to help suspend your disbelief in a entertaining way. The African American experience in America can be horrific, it is a reality that belongs in some fictional horror story but fortunately is very real. Within very few pages, I became attached to characters and longed for the stories to continue. This author has an incredible talent to draw the reader in, and make them uncomfortable. Some of the story's deserve a trigger warning because they involve sexual abuse, prostitution and graphic violence. But overall I was never overwhelmed with what was described because it hit so close to home.
I would recommend this to everyone who can handle uncomfortable topics and enjoy engaging and memorable writing. This was a brief but powerful collection of stories, that lend themselves open to interpretation. Below are my brief spoiler free thoughts on each:
Walter and the Three Legged King - Walter is a man determined to make a life for himself. He gets a unlikely wake up call, that leads him to better opportunities. This story has great visceral descriptions of what it's like to live in poverty.
Purse- This involves a women dealing with the hustle and bustle or riding a NYC subway. But very quickly things take a turn. I was genuinely surprised at the story's ability to grip me in three short pages.
I Make People Do Bad Things - There's some great fantastical elements included in this story of a crime regime lead and maintained by Madame St. Clair. Madame St. Clair has to grapple with making morally just decisions, in a business where making money trumps all.
The Unremembered- This takes the relateable narrative of having a sick child, and adds new meaning towards perseverance and the value of past knowledge.
Chocolate Park - It's clearly very difficult to keep a family together who has been forever marked by poverty and tragedy. Three sisters find their own ways to hope and make a future for themselves. This was emotionally wrenching and includes some very violent and sexually abusive scenes, not for the faint of heart.
What She Saw When They Flew Away - Everyone deals with loss differently, but it can be extremely hard to help a child deal with grief. This story illustrates how crippling grief can be, and how one mother learns the importance of being free.
He Who Takes the Pain Away - A very touching and symbolic story challenging ideas about faith and belief.
CUE:Change - It seems like everyone has a zombie story to tell, but this zombie story is about much more then mindless monsters. These zombies have a plan, this bizarre narrative highlights how hard change can be.
The Room Where Ben Disappeared - The only story told from the perspective of a white man, this had some very relatable moments of worry and despair.
The Light of Cree - This is a coming of age story, where how to accept your purpose takes main stage.
The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason - People fear the unknown, but some people are created to address the fearful abyss. This story is as fantastical as it is true, it was fantastic.
This short story collection rocked my socks off. Each story had enough real world and fantastical elements to help suspend your disbelief in a entertaining way. The African American experience in America can be horrific, it is a reality that belongs in some fictional horror story but fortunately is very real. Within very few pages, I became attached to characters and longed for the stories to continue. This author has an incredible talent to draw the reader in, and make them uncomfortable. Some of the story's deserve a trigger warning because they involve sexual abuse, prostitution and graphic violence. But overall I was never overwhelmed with what was described because it hit so close to home.
I would recommend this to everyone who can handle uncomfortable topics and enjoy engaging and memorable writing. This was a brief but powerful collection of stories, that lend themselves open to interpretation. Below are my brief spoiler free thoughts on each:
Walter and the Three Legged King - Walter is a man determined to make a life for himself. He gets a unlikely wake up call, that leads him to better opportunities. This story has great visceral descriptions of what it's like to live in poverty.
Purse- This involves a women dealing with the hustle and bustle or riding a NYC subway. But very quickly things take a turn. I was genuinely surprised at the story's ability to grip me in three short pages.
I Make People Do Bad Things - There's some great fantastical elements included in this story of a crime regime lead and maintained by Madame St. Clair. Madame St. Clair has to grapple with making morally just decisions, in a business where making money trumps all.
The Unremembered- This takes the relateable narrative of having a sick child, and adds new meaning towards perseverance and the value of past knowledge.
"The slavery my dear was not the most difficult part; no the hard part
was the loss. The loss of everything past, present and future. To take
away one's past is to deny them a future."
Chocolate Park - It's clearly very difficult to keep a family together who has been forever marked by poverty and tragedy. Three sisters find their own ways to hope and make a future for themselves. This was emotionally wrenching and includes some very violent and sexually abusive scenes, not for the faint of heart.
What She Saw When They Flew Away - Everyone deals with loss differently, but it can be extremely hard to help a child deal with grief. This story illustrates how crippling grief can be, and how one mother learns the importance of being free.
He Who Takes the Pain Away - A very touching and symbolic story challenging ideas about faith and belief.
CUE:Change - It seems like everyone has a zombie story to tell, but this zombie story is about much more then mindless monsters. These zombies have a plan, this bizarre narrative highlights how hard change can be.
"In fact, some may say that our special garden variety of zombie was actually less threatening than the brutal police or rich perverts who
had roamed our streets previously. At least they weren't licensed by corrupt laws. That was how I saw it, it's how a lot of people saw it."
The Room Where Ben Disappeared - The only story told from the perspective of a white man, this had some very relatable moments of worry and despair.
The Light of Cree - This is a coming of age story, where how to accept your purpose takes main stage.
The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason - People fear the unknown, but some people are created to address the fearful abyss. This story is as fantastical as it is true, it was fantastic.
August 9, 2011
This was an extremely uneven collection of short stories. The best of them were absolutely stunning, heart-wrenching and thought-provoking. The worst were clunky, unsubtle, and lost their power (for me at least) as a result. All of the stories had some sort of fantastic element; unfortunately, the fantastic element seemed more likely to weaken the story than strengthen it. Still, good and bad, it's a collection very much concerned with power dynamics within families, between men and women, between poor and rich (or sometimes only less-poor), and between blacks and whites; themes I am always interested in and happy to see explored in fiction.
---
"Walter and the Three-Legged King" -- This starts as a straight piece of horror, about a poor man in a dirty apartment, who keeps spotting a rat that the building super insists isn't there. It succeeded in horrifying me; and then it went somewhere more political. The collection gets its title from this story, and I love the title; but the story itself doesn't do very much with the concept other than lay it out there. ★★★1/2
"Purse" -- This was my favorite story in the collection; I would not change a word of it. It's extremely short, so I can't really say anything about it without spoiling it, but it's visceral and gruesome and tragic. ★★★★★
"I Make People do Bad Things" -- And this was my second favorite story in the collection, a period piece about Madam St. Clair and the numbers racket in Harlem in the 1930s. Burke's character development shines in this one, and the horror is psychologically rather than fantastically rooted. (The fantastic element is pretty damn cool, though, and totally essential to the story.) My only objection was that it was structured as a flashback; I felt this was unnecessary and took some of the oomph out of the story. ★★★★
"The Unremembered" -- My least favorite story of the collection. It gives a magical explanation for a girl named Jeli's autism and is fierce on the subject of the Christian clergy's usefulness. Unfortunately, I found the message of the story entirely too heavy-handed, and while the two mothers' characters are well-drawn, that was not enough for me to enjoy this story. ★
"Chocolate Park" -- This story is, in some way I'm having trouble defining to myself, the rawest of the collection. The characters - a trio of sisters, an old woman, and a local thug living in the same inner city neighborhood - are ugliest to each other here, and there is power in that even though I don't particularly enjoy reading it. Unfortunately, it felt split to me; ugly though it was, I was invested in Ebony's thread and was not in Lady Black's; it made me wish Burke had gone a straight-realist route and forsworn the Lady Black character entirely. ★★1/2
"What She Saw When They Flew Away" -- This is another (relatively) straightforward story about loss, like "Purse." I don't think it worked as well, mostly because so much more is spelled out for the reader. However, the central image is absolutely haunting. ★★★
"He Who Takes the Pain Away" -- I must admit, I did not get this one. I could not tell if it was meant to be read as realism or allegory, whether the fantastical element was actually present or a hallucination. I wanted to like it, and its depiction of a cult of death was properly horrific, but without knowing how to read it I can't really assess whether I liked it or not. (Unratable)
"CUE: Change" -- I'm not really a zombie person. That said, there was an interesting twist on the zombies themselves that I wish had been explored more fully, and I thought the first-person narrator was very nicely (and subtly) drawn. ★★★★
"The Room Where Ben Disappeared" -- This is another one, like "I Make People Do Bad Things," where I wish Burke had used a different technique to tell her story. The first-person narrator grated on me in this story, and the fantastic element actually seemed to undercut the horror of the realism (like in "Chocolate Park"). He was the only white protagonist in the collection, and one of only two men, and he seemed. . . minor, forgettable compared to how memorable Burke's other protagonists are. But the piece of his past that he forgot. . . even with the fantastic element erasing the worst possible outcome, the stark realities of being black (and white, really) in the South made me want to scream. ★★★
"The Light of Cree" -- This story felt like a prologue; in fact, several of the stories felt like prologues (I assume that's what Delany meant in his blurb about "intriguingly open endings"). But this one more than the others -- it's about a girl who has just had her first period and discovers that she's different in more ways than that overnight. We see her realize that, and then the story ends, and I was left thinking "And then what happened?" (Particularly because Cree is no Jennifer Love Hewitt. . . and that's a good thing.) ★★1/2
"The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason" -- This is the biggest of the stories, both in pages and in scope. It spans quite a few years and miles, following the powerful titular character through several small Southern towns where she touched down lightly and left chaos in her wake. (No, not chaos; mess, certainly, but a cleaner mess than the one she walked into, if that makes any sense.) I think the story would have benefited from being even longer; there's enough here for a novel, at least. Part of the reason I wanted it to be longer is that it suffers from the same problem many of the stories do: over-exposition. But in this case the exposition was actually necessary for the story to get told, so while it annoyed me just as much as before, I have to admit it was justified. Also again, my favorite moment is a non-fantastic one; there is a single moment of epic tragedy, made all the more poignant because it's so personal, so small. The story itself was just okay for me, and would have been just okay even if it had been expanded; but that moment was awesome. ★★★★
---
"Walter and the Three-Legged King" -- This starts as a straight piece of horror, about a poor man in a dirty apartment, who keeps spotting a rat that the building super insists isn't there. It succeeded in horrifying me; and then it went somewhere more political. The collection gets its title from this story, and I love the title; but the story itself doesn't do very much with the concept other than lay it out there. ★★★1/2
"Purse" -- This was my favorite story in the collection; I would not change a word of it. It's extremely short, so I can't really say anything about it without spoiling it, but it's visceral and gruesome and tragic. ★★★★★
"I Make People do Bad Things" -- And this was my second favorite story in the collection, a period piece about Madam St. Clair and the numbers racket in Harlem in the 1930s. Burke's character development shines in this one, and the horror is psychologically rather than fantastically rooted. (The fantastic element is pretty damn cool, though, and totally essential to the story.) My only objection was that it was structured as a flashback; I felt this was unnecessary and took some of the oomph out of the story. ★★★★
"The Unremembered" -- My least favorite story of the collection. It gives a magical explanation for a girl named Jeli's autism and is fierce on the subject of the Christian clergy's usefulness. Unfortunately, I found the message of the story entirely too heavy-handed, and while the two mothers' characters are well-drawn, that was not enough for me to enjoy this story. ★
"Chocolate Park" -- This story is, in some way I'm having trouble defining to myself, the rawest of the collection. The characters - a trio of sisters, an old woman, and a local thug living in the same inner city neighborhood - are ugliest to each other here, and there is power in that even though I don't particularly enjoy reading it. Unfortunately, it felt split to me; ugly though it was, I was invested in Ebony's thread and was not in Lady Black's; it made me wish Burke had gone a straight-realist route and forsworn the Lady Black character entirely. ★★1/2
"What She Saw When They Flew Away" -- This is another (relatively) straightforward story about loss, like "Purse." I don't think it worked as well, mostly because so much more is spelled out for the reader. However, the central image is absolutely haunting. ★★★
"He Who Takes the Pain Away" -- I must admit, I did not get this one. I could not tell if it was meant to be read as realism or allegory, whether the fantastical element was actually present or a hallucination. I wanted to like it, and its depiction of a cult of death was properly horrific, but without knowing how to read it I can't really assess whether I liked it or not. (Unratable)
"CUE: Change" -- I'm not really a zombie person. That said, there was an interesting twist on the zombies themselves that I wish had been explored more fully, and I thought the first-person narrator was very nicely (and subtly) drawn. ★★★★
"The Room Where Ben Disappeared" -- This is another one, like "I Make People Do Bad Things," where I wish Burke had used a different technique to tell her story. The first-person narrator grated on me in this story, and the fantastic element actually seemed to undercut the horror of the realism (like in "Chocolate Park"). He was the only white protagonist in the collection, and one of only two men, and he seemed. . . minor, forgettable compared to how memorable Burke's other protagonists are. But the piece of his past that he forgot. . . even with the fantastic element erasing the worst possible outcome, the stark realities of being black (and white, really) in the South made me want to scream. ★★★
"The Light of Cree" -- This story felt like a prologue; in fact, several of the stories felt like prologues (I assume that's what Delany meant in his blurb about "intriguingly open endings"). But this one more than the others -- it's about a girl who has just had her first period and discovers that she's different in more ways than that overnight. We see her realize that, and then the story ends, and I was left thinking "And then what happened?" (Particularly because Cree is no Jennifer Love Hewitt. . . and that's a good thing.) ★★1/2
"The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason" -- This is the biggest of the stories, both in pages and in scope. It spans quite a few years and miles, following the powerful titular character through several small Southern towns where she touched down lightly and left chaos in her wake. (No, not chaos; mess, certainly, but a cleaner mess than the one she walked into, if that makes any sense.) I think the story would have benefited from being even longer; there's enough here for a novel, at least. Part of the reason I wanted it to be longer is that it suffers from the same problem many of the stories do: over-exposition. But in this case the exposition was actually necessary for the story to get told, so while it annoyed me just as much as before, I have to admit it was justified. Also again, my favorite moment is a non-fantastic one; there is a single moment of epic tragedy, made all the more poignant because it's so personal, so small. The story itself was just okay for me, and would have been just okay even if it had been expanded; but that moment was awesome. ★★★★
February 26, 2021
This collection of eleven short stories should definitely be considered horror, but what is most terrifying about them isn't the supernatural elements or talking rats or zombies (though that’s definitely scary enough!). It's the othering that the characters they endure because they are Black and how they navigate that.
Burke shines a bright light on this type of fear, the real fear of not being able to go about your day as who you are because someone might take offense to you. The stories offer urban realism as characters grapple with decisions and make choices that are often forced upon them. The stories are often claustrophobic, but it's a good uncomfortable, the type that makes you see through someone else's eyes, analyzing your own perspective and assumptions about race, class, gender, and the human condition.
Burke shines a bright light on this type of fear, the real fear of not being able to go about your day as who you are because someone might take offense to you. The stories offer urban realism as characters grapple with decisions and make choices that are often forced upon them. The stories are often claustrophobic, but it's a good uncomfortable, the type that makes you see through someone else's eyes, analyzing your own perspective and assumptions about race, class, gender, and the human condition.
March 8, 2019
"Somehow, someplace, I'm coming for you."
Let's Play White is a collection of 11 stories from Chesya Burke. This was my introduction to Chesya's writing, and I enjoyed it! The stories were hit or miss for me, but I liked the collection as a whole. There's a good variety of stories in this collection, and I was entertained while reading.
My top 4 stories were Walter and the Three-Legged King, Purse, Chocolate Park, and What She Saw When They Flew Away. These were all intriguing, and I think my number one story was Purse. It was quick and gruesome, and I was kind of hoping the other stories would be on that level.
I didn't love all of the stories, but I would definitely read something from Chesya Burke again.
Let's Play White is a collection of 11 stories from Chesya Burke. This was my introduction to Chesya's writing, and I enjoyed it! The stories were hit or miss for me, but I liked the collection as a whole. There's a good variety of stories in this collection, and I was entertained while reading.
My top 4 stories were Walter and the Three-Legged King, Purse, Chocolate Park, and What She Saw When They Flew Away. These were all intriguing, and I think my number one story was Purse. It was quick and gruesome, and I was kind of hoping the other stories would be on that level.
I didn't love all of the stories, but I would definitely read something from Chesya Burke again.
February 2, 2021
One of my favorite ways to work through a collection is to sample a story every day, make it the first thing I read in the morning and think about it throughout the day. Right from the start, Burke’s collection offered quite a bit to monopolize my mind. I’m a sucker for a well-curated anthology/collection. A strong opening story goes a long way toward winning me over. Walter and the Three Legged King is that story. Burke seamlessly mixes surreal horror, lightly tinged with fantasy, and then drives the story to a very real place in a blatantly jarring manner. It’s easily one of the best stories in the collection.
Walter is followed by the one-two punch of Purse, a very suspenseful entry, and I Make People Do Bad Things, whose final lines made the hair on my arm stand up. It’s that good. My other favorite story here is Chocolate Park, an almost novelette length story told in three parts. Part one is heartbreaking and raw. The reader is allowed to feel everything the characters go through. By the time the story carries us along to part three, there are some engrossing supernatural and horror elements that bring the tale full circle.
He Who Takes the Pain Away is another vibrant entry, leaving us asking what is pain without suffering? It’s a big story. That’s the best way I can think to put it. Cue: Change is a very timely and poignant entry in the book, also a zombie story. I’d also add the first person narration worked nicely for me here.
Nearly half the book’s runtime belongs to the novella-length The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason. This story spans place, time, and belief. At its core, it is fantastical and Burke’s love for her titular character shines through. In addition to the main character, Iona and Leona, captured my attention and my investment. The care that went into crafting these two makes for a grand payoff at the story’s conclusion.
Let’s Play White contains eleven stories, but I only mentioned six, which is not entirely reminiscent of my reading experience. It implies that just over 50% of the collection resonated with me, and the other 45% glided by unnoticed, and this is not the case. Every day I started with a Burke story felt a little more full, a little more thoughtful, and I highly recommend these stories to any reader who enjoys depth of character and flashes of magic.
Walter is followed by the one-two punch of Purse, a very suspenseful entry, and I Make People Do Bad Things, whose final lines made the hair on my arm stand up. It’s that good. My other favorite story here is Chocolate Park, an almost novelette length story told in three parts. Part one is heartbreaking and raw. The reader is allowed to feel everything the characters go through. By the time the story carries us along to part three, there are some engrossing supernatural and horror elements that bring the tale full circle.
He Who Takes the Pain Away is another vibrant entry, leaving us asking what is pain without suffering? It’s a big story. That’s the best way I can think to put it. Cue: Change is a very timely and poignant entry in the book, also a zombie story. I’d also add the first person narration worked nicely for me here.
Nearly half the book’s runtime belongs to the novella-length The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason. This story spans place, time, and belief. At its core, it is fantastical and Burke’s love for her titular character shines through. In addition to the main character, Iona and Leona, captured my attention and my investment. The care that went into crafting these two makes for a grand payoff at the story’s conclusion.
Let’s Play White contains eleven stories, but I only mentioned six, which is not entirely reminiscent of my reading experience. It implies that just over 50% of the collection resonated with me, and the other 45% glided by unnoticed, and this is not the case. Every day I started with a Burke story felt a little more full, a little more thoughtful, and I highly recommend these stories to any reader who enjoys depth of character and flashes of magic.
September 14, 2019
There were a few bangers in here, but I found myself getting fatigued by the stories that weren't landing for me. This is something that happens to me a lot when reading short story collections, which is why I typically avoid them (as I prefer novella/novels.) The mechanics of the writing in here was okay, but not nearly as strong as the ideas that Burke was presenting, which spanned many topics, social commentaries, and tones. I can see this really resonating with people, and I think Chesya Burke is a writer with a lot to say, but this was just too uneven for me (again, as are most short story collections, IMHO.) That said, I'm definitely still onboard for checking out more of Chesya Burke's work.
August 9, 2011
Meeting a book is a lot like meeting a person for the first time. The setting, the company we find ourselves in (the book included), and the general ambiance all have an impact. The honest truth of the matter is that if I - a middle-class white guy in my late twenties - had not had the pleasure of meeting Chesya Burke at Readercon this past year, I probably would have skipped over her collection
Let's Play White
. I would have judged it solely on the title, and Jordan Casteel's excellent cover, as being intended for a different audience. And if I had skipped it, I would have missed a quiet collection of emotionally powerful short stories that remind me of Shirley Jackson at her best.
It's tough to try and identify a common theme across the eleven stories in this collection. Yes, they all deal with race, class, and gender to some extent. But the stories avoid both strident polemics and simplistic allegory. Instead, Burke focuses on the more emotionally intense inner experiences of her characters, thus going beyond the superficial trappings of race, gender, or class. It's tough to bring the totality of a character - incorporating both their personality and societal context - to life in a work of short fiction. There just isn't that much room to build that reader/character relationship. But in each of the book's stories, Burke pulls it off by giving us vibrant, powerful, and vivid characters that we can follow and feel for. Which is why the horror of their experiences is so powerful.
The stories in this collection are tough to classify. They skirt the liminal edge between horror, dark urban fantasy, noir, and straightforward mainstream literary fiction. Stories like "Walter and the Three-Legged King" or "He Who Takes the Pain Away" have a magical realist flavor to them, but the magic does not produce horror in the reader. Instead, the choices the characters make, and the consequences of those choices evoke that sense of horror.
Several of the stories stand out as being particularly effective. "I Make People Do Bad Things" is an excellent noir story set in early 1930's Harlem. Anyone familiar with the history of post-Prohibition gangs in New York will enjoy Burke's spin. Most of the stories and movies (like The Cotton Club) I've come across that focus on that time period tend to zoom in on the larger-than-life personalities of Bumpy Johnson, Dutch Schultz, and Lucky Luciano. But "I Make People Do Bad Things" instead focuses on Madame St. Clair, who was the Dutchman's primary competition in the Harlem numbers racket. Burke opens up an interesting (fictional) window into her life and times, and in particular into a relationship she develops with a young girl with mysterious powers. The story pulls no punches, and portrays the kind of hard-as-nails toughness that is particular to all great noir stories. Yet at the same time, Burke manages to make St. Clair a more human character than most noir heroes, with fully realized flaws, regrets, and acceptance of choices made.
Both "Purse" and "What She Saw When They Flew Away" are quiet, heartfelt stories of loss that have few - if any - fantastical elements to them. The former evokes horror both on an emotional and visual level, while the latter is difficult to even call horror, unless that is the horror of deep sorrow. Were it not for the powerful visuals in "Purse" I suspect both stories would fit well within mainstream literary magazines, opening a window into the sad reality of women coming to terms with the loss of daughters and sisters. In many respects, I thought that they blended the quiet humanity of Shirley Jackson's best work with Richard Matheson's tactical use of violence.
Of the stories in this collection, "The Room Where Ben Disappeared" brought Shirley Jackson most to mind. In particular, it reminded me of my favorite Jackson short story ("Flower Garden", which I've written about before). From a plotting and a stylistic standpoint, the two stories are very different. For one, "The Room Where Ben Disappeared" is more insistent. For another, it is much more direct than the Jackson story and represents bigotry head-on in its action. Yet despite this directness, it evokes similar sensations of horror and judgment, while retaining a quiet depth that will stay with me for quite some time.
Not all of the stories in this collection worked for me. In particular, I found the plot of "Walter and the Three-Legged King" unsatisfying at its conclusion. Much as I love ambiguous endings left open to interpretation, I felt that this story's ending was too rushed, missing out on a symmetry to balance its excellent beginning and middle. Similarly, "CUE: Change" stood out as being a touch more simplistic than most of the other stories in the collection. In and of itself, it was not a bad story: the narrator's voice was excellent (arguably one of the best executed voices in the collection) but I found that the story's resolution lacked the subtlety and quiet resonance of its neighbors. Of the eleven stories in the collection, only three didn't really work for me.
If you're looking for a gore-spattered mess of horror, then Let's Play White is probably not the book for you. Sure, Burke has scenes of visceral blood and guts, but they are rare in these stories, and then only used to evoke horror tangentially. Like Jackson, Burke taps into that eternal font of the most horrific aspects of humanity: our twisted desires, reasoning, and emotions. She shows what happens when we are pushed too far, but she does it with a deft hand and subtlety that is refreshing. I'm looking forward to reading more of her work in the future!
It's tough to try and identify a common theme across the eleven stories in this collection. Yes, they all deal with race, class, and gender to some extent. But the stories avoid both strident polemics and simplistic allegory. Instead, Burke focuses on the more emotionally intense inner experiences of her characters, thus going beyond the superficial trappings of race, gender, or class. It's tough to bring the totality of a character - incorporating both their personality and societal context - to life in a work of short fiction. There just isn't that much room to build that reader/character relationship. But in each of the book's stories, Burke pulls it off by giving us vibrant, powerful, and vivid characters that we can follow and feel for. Which is why the horror of their experiences is so powerful.
The stories in this collection are tough to classify. They skirt the liminal edge between horror, dark urban fantasy, noir, and straightforward mainstream literary fiction. Stories like "Walter and the Three-Legged King" or "He Who Takes the Pain Away" have a magical realist flavor to them, but the magic does not produce horror in the reader. Instead, the choices the characters make, and the consequences of those choices evoke that sense of horror.
Several of the stories stand out as being particularly effective. "I Make People Do Bad Things" is an excellent noir story set in early 1930's Harlem. Anyone familiar with the history of post-Prohibition gangs in New York will enjoy Burke's spin. Most of the stories and movies (like The Cotton Club) I've come across that focus on that time period tend to zoom in on the larger-than-life personalities of Bumpy Johnson, Dutch Schultz, and Lucky Luciano. But "I Make People Do Bad Things" instead focuses on Madame St. Clair, who was the Dutchman's primary competition in the Harlem numbers racket. Burke opens up an interesting (fictional) window into her life and times, and in particular into a relationship she develops with a young girl with mysterious powers. The story pulls no punches, and portrays the kind of hard-as-nails toughness that is particular to all great noir stories. Yet at the same time, Burke manages to make St. Clair a more human character than most noir heroes, with fully realized flaws, regrets, and acceptance of choices made.
Both "Purse" and "What She Saw When They Flew Away" are quiet, heartfelt stories of loss that have few - if any - fantastical elements to them. The former evokes horror both on an emotional and visual level, while the latter is difficult to even call horror, unless that is the horror of deep sorrow. Were it not for the powerful visuals in "Purse" I suspect both stories would fit well within mainstream literary magazines, opening a window into the sad reality of women coming to terms with the loss of daughters and sisters. In many respects, I thought that they blended the quiet humanity of Shirley Jackson's best work with Richard Matheson's tactical use of violence.
Of the stories in this collection, "The Room Where Ben Disappeared" brought Shirley Jackson most to mind. In particular, it reminded me of my favorite Jackson short story ("Flower Garden", which I've written about before). From a plotting and a stylistic standpoint, the two stories are very different. For one, "The Room Where Ben Disappeared" is more insistent. For another, it is much more direct than the Jackson story and represents bigotry head-on in its action. Yet despite this directness, it evokes similar sensations of horror and judgment, while retaining a quiet depth that will stay with me for quite some time.
Not all of the stories in this collection worked for me. In particular, I found the plot of "Walter and the Three-Legged King" unsatisfying at its conclusion. Much as I love ambiguous endings left open to interpretation, I felt that this story's ending was too rushed, missing out on a symmetry to balance its excellent beginning and middle. Similarly, "CUE: Change" stood out as being a touch more simplistic than most of the other stories in the collection. In and of itself, it was not a bad story: the narrator's voice was excellent (arguably one of the best executed voices in the collection) but I found that the story's resolution lacked the subtlety and quiet resonance of its neighbors. Of the eleven stories in the collection, only three didn't really work for me.
If you're looking for a gore-spattered mess of horror, then Let's Play White is probably not the book for you. Sure, Burke has scenes of visceral blood and guts, but they are rare in these stories, and then only used to evoke horror tangentially. Like Jackson, Burke taps into that eternal font of the most horrific aspects of humanity: our twisted desires, reasoning, and emotions. She shows what happens when we are pushed too far, but she does it with a deft hand and subtlety that is refreshing. I'm looking forward to reading more of her work in the future!
August 18, 2020
A collection of horror/dark fantasy/historical fiction stories about the experiences of black, poor and/or female people in the United States - a sadly-uncommon viewpoint in the genre. Thematically, Burke's stories tend to revolve around awakenings of various sorts, and the fact that her protagonists tend to end their stories on an upward trajectory is, again, an unusual one in the genre - there's a lot of breaking free from false consciousness here (what the kids call getting "woke"). The epigraph for one story is a very apropos Du Bois quote about double consciousness.
The stories here are split about 50/50 between previously published ones (dating back to 2004) and new entries (2011), and the latter show a huge increase in confidence and style. The stories are not presented chronologically, which makes reading the collection a very uneven one, but it's worth it to push through to the end. At her worst, Burke's prose is chunky and unconvincing, but when it works it has an appealing folksiness that immerses the reader in the world-weary, worked-past-exhaustion viewpoints of her characters.
Walter and the Three-Legged King (2011)
Walter, a down-on-his-luck black laborer, is about to be evicted from his apartment when he starts having conversations with a rat who has also taken up residence there. The recession is over, he keeps hearing, but that doesn't seem to have given him any more options for work - his white landlord, meanwhile, lives off of family money and suffers from agoraphobia - "one could afford to have a paralyzing fear if one had options in life." King, the rat (a by-product of the squalid environment Walter finds himself in), suggests that the solution to Walter's problems just might be "playing white" and he uses this advice to transition from non-existant factory work to the service economy. A smart, important story.
Purse (2011)
A quick conte cruel about a down-on-her-luck black woman riding the NYC subway and her descent into paranoia. Introduces the theme of black women's sexuality, which runs throughout many of the stories here, but also prose-wise a weak point of Burke's, who has a strange way of framing illicit subjects like sex and drugs, as in "She never thought that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to steal the priceless valuables that she kept safely hidden under her skirt and between her ebony legs. The one thing her husband had always called his 'special place.'"
I Make People Do Bad Things (2011)
Historical fiction slightly weirded - Stephanie "Queenie" Saint-Clair, a numbers-running gangster/Robin Hood-ish figure in Prohibition-era Harlem, was a real person, as was her associate Bumpy Johnson and her rival Dutch Schultz, but here she's also paired up with the daughter of a prostitute who has the supernatural ability to make people kill themselves. Another story of Black Americans with few options in hopeless, miserable places, but this one kind of runs out of steam and falters into a rushed ending.
The Unremembered (2010)
A severely autistic girl is in the hospital because of increasingly-frequent seizures and self-inflicted(?) wounds, accompanied only by her distraught and harried mother. She serves as a metaphor for the black diaspora in the US - her grandmother had carried on the tradition of the griots, but her mother had turned her back on it (possibly in favor of a rather predatory Christianity). A series of dreams of Africa awakens her to reality.
Chocolate Park (2004)
A Rashomon-style mosaic story set in the projects, focusing on three orphaned sisters and a black magic woman navigating an environment of crime and prostitution and abject poverty. The low point of the collection - like I said, Burke has an odd way of talking about sex and "the drugs," which gives this story a deficit from which it never manages to recover.
What She Saw When They Flew Away (2011)
A mother mourns the loss of one of her twin daughters (who loved to run) while setting free their pet birds. The only strictly mimetic/realist piece here.
He Who Takes Away the Pain (2004)
A short, odd allegory about a misogynistic cult on a small island off the coast of Africa whose members focus on the titular deity(?) and resist the ministrations of a mysterious nurse even as they all die of smallpox. Like "The Unremembered," the suggestion seems to be that African American faith in Christianity is misplaced.
CUE: Change (2011)
In which Burke actually makes a zombie apocalypse interesting by presenting it through the eyes of characters whose lives already took place in a racist hellscape. I've avoided mentioning Butler so far because I think that's a lazy shortcut for people talking about black women writing in genre, but her work gets explicitly mentioned in this one, so... there you go. The apocalypse, it seems, started in the inner cities, wherein the zombies were initially somewhat camouflaged because of the outside (white) world's lack of attention. There's a twist that's thematically opposed to "Walter and the Three-Legged King," and while this was a great story (and kind of the heart of the collection), I think there's a tension resulting from it trying to be two different stories at once that never really gets resolved.
The Room Where Ben Disappeared (2004)
A white man returns to the town of his childhood, where his haunted house leads him to reexamine some repressed memories about race in the Jim Crow South. More Jackson/Aickmanish than the others.
The Light of Cree (2006)
A girl gets her first period and also the ability to see and guide dead people. This is like an unfinished rough draft of the next story.
The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason (2011)
The distillation of all the other stories into one novella; by far the best (and longest) work here, it manages to grapple convincingly with racism, misogyny, colorism, sisterhood, communitarianism, generational divides, untrustworthy churches, and agency and passivity, even while shephering along a well-paced and interesting plotline. A witch plies her trade in Colored Town, KY some time in the early 20th century, and finds a set of young twins who need her guidance in harnessing their powers (especially to see and guide dead people). Also, a creepy haunted house!
The stories here are split about 50/50 between previously published ones (dating back to 2004) and new entries (2011), and the latter show a huge increase in confidence and style. The stories are not presented chronologically, which makes reading the collection a very uneven one, but it's worth it to push through to the end. At her worst, Burke's prose is chunky and unconvincing, but when it works it has an appealing folksiness that immerses the reader in the world-weary, worked-past-exhaustion viewpoints of her characters.
Walter and the Three-Legged King (2011)
Walter, a down-on-his-luck black laborer, is about to be evicted from his apartment when he starts having conversations with a rat who has also taken up residence there. The recession is over, he keeps hearing, but that doesn't seem to have given him any more options for work - his white landlord, meanwhile, lives off of family money and suffers from agoraphobia - "one could afford to have a paralyzing fear if one had options in life." King, the rat (a by-product of the squalid environment Walter finds himself in), suggests that the solution to Walter's problems just might be "playing white" and he uses this advice to transition from non-existant factory work to the service economy. A smart, important story.
Purse (2011)
A quick conte cruel about a down-on-her-luck black woman riding the NYC subway and her descent into paranoia. Introduces the theme of black women's sexuality, which runs throughout many of the stories here, but also prose-wise a weak point of Burke's, who has a strange way of framing illicit subjects like sex and drugs, as in "She never thought that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to steal the priceless valuables that she kept safely hidden under her skirt and between her ebony legs. The one thing her husband had always called his 'special place.'"
I Make People Do Bad Things (2011)
Historical fiction slightly weirded - Stephanie "Queenie" Saint-Clair, a numbers-running gangster/Robin Hood-ish figure in Prohibition-era Harlem, was a real person, as was her associate Bumpy Johnson and her rival Dutch Schultz, but here she's also paired up with the daughter of a prostitute who has the supernatural ability to make people kill themselves. Another story of Black Americans with few options in hopeless, miserable places, but this one kind of runs out of steam and falters into a rushed ending.
The Unremembered (2010)
A severely autistic girl is in the hospital because of increasingly-frequent seizures and self-inflicted(?) wounds, accompanied only by her distraught and harried mother. She serves as a metaphor for the black diaspora in the US - her grandmother had carried on the tradition of the griots, but her mother had turned her back on it (possibly in favor of a rather predatory Christianity). A series of dreams of Africa awakens her to reality.
Chocolate Park (2004)
A Rashomon-style mosaic story set in the projects, focusing on three orphaned sisters and a black magic woman navigating an environment of crime and prostitution and abject poverty. The low point of the collection - like I said, Burke has an odd way of talking about sex and "the drugs," which gives this story a deficit from which it never manages to recover.
What She Saw When They Flew Away (2011)
A mother mourns the loss of one of her twin daughters (who loved to run) while setting free their pet birds. The only strictly mimetic/realist piece here.
He Who Takes Away the Pain (2004)
A short, odd allegory about a misogynistic cult on a small island off the coast of Africa whose members focus on the titular deity(?) and resist the ministrations of a mysterious nurse even as they all die of smallpox. Like "The Unremembered," the suggestion seems to be that African American faith in Christianity is misplaced.
CUE: Change (2011)
In which Burke actually makes a zombie apocalypse interesting by presenting it through the eyes of characters whose lives already took place in a racist hellscape. I've avoided mentioning Butler so far because I think that's a lazy shortcut for people talking about black women writing in genre, but her work gets explicitly mentioned in this one, so... there you go. The apocalypse, it seems, started in the inner cities, wherein the zombies were initially somewhat camouflaged because of the outside (white) world's lack of attention. There's a twist that's thematically opposed to "Walter and the Three-Legged King," and while this was a great story (and kind of the heart of the collection), I think there's a tension resulting from it trying to be two different stories at once that never really gets resolved.
The Room Where Ben Disappeared (2004)
A white man returns to the town of his childhood, where his haunted house leads him to reexamine some repressed memories about race in the Jim Crow South. More Jackson/Aickmanish than the others.
The Light of Cree (2006)
A girl gets her first period and also the ability to see and guide dead people. This is like an unfinished rough draft of the next story.
The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason (2011)
The distillation of all the other stories into one novella; by far the best (and longest) work here, it manages to grapple convincingly with racism, misogyny, colorism, sisterhood, communitarianism, generational divides, untrustworthy churches, and agency and passivity, even while shephering along a well-paced and interesting plotline. A witch plies her trade in Colored Town, KY some time in the early 20th century, and finds a set of young twins who need her guidance in harnessing their powers (especially to see and guide dead people). Also, a creepy haunted house!
November 22, 2019
Review is up today on www.scifiandscary.com
“Old Sam was dying. He had been dying for approximately twenty-seven years, by Queenie’s account” (“I Make People Do Bad Things”, Chesya Burke)
One of my reading goals for 2019 was to continue to seek out diverse works from often underrepresented groups of people such as LGBT+ authors, people of color, women, and all possible intersections of the three. Last year, I joined the Ladies of Horror Fiction team, a group of readers and reviewers (who I have come to love and cherish as some of my closest friends) dedicated to shining a spotlight on women writing in the horror genre. Let’s Play White was an easy purchase for me. The synopsis sounded amazing and I’ve come to know Apex Publications as a great place to find quality horror fiction.
Let’s Play White is a collection of short stories that ends with a short novella. While I enjoyed almost all of these stories, for the sake of time, here are my favorites:
“Purse” – Short, sharp body horror
“I Make People Do Bad Things” – A successful Harlem madam has a secret weapon
“Chocolate Park” – Addiction, black magic, revenge. Perfect combo.
“What She Saw When They Flew Away” – this one broke my heart. Full of emotion, grief, and love.
“He Who Takes the Pain Away” – Bizarre tale that just captivated me. Has a character called “The Black Man” who is also in other stories. I like the continuity of this.
“The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason” – this short novella was the perfect end to an already strong collection. This is such a beautiful story of loss and struggle and hope.
I need more from Chesya Burke. I love how her writing moves with ease from sharp and brutal, to the perfect, gorgeously formed, turn of phrase; whatever the story needs, she gives it. The reader gets taken to the depths of society, into worlds that are real yet unfamiliar, and all the while we can trust Burke to captivate us along the way. Read this book if you haven’t already, I definitely recommend it.
“Old Sam was dying. He had been dying for approximately twenty-seven years, by Queenie’s account” (“I Make People Do Bad Things”, Chesya Burke)
One of my reading goals for 2019 was to continue to seek out diverse works from often underrepresented groups of people such as LGBT+ authors, people of color, women, and all possible intersections of the three. Last year, I joined the Ladies of Horror Fiction team, a group of readers and reviewers (who I have come to love and cherish as some of my closest friends) dedicated to shining a spotlight on women writing in the horror genre. Let’s Play White was an easy purchase for me. The synopsis sounded amazing and I’ve come to know Apex Publications as a great place to find quality horror fiction.
Let’s Play White is a collection of short stories that ends with a short novella. While I enjoyed almost all of these stories, for the sake of time, here are my favorites:
“Purse” – Short, sharp body horror
“I Make People Do Bad Things” – A successful Harlem madam has a secret weapon
“Chocolate Park” – Addiction, black magic, revenge. Perfect combo.
“What She Saw When They Flew Away” – this one broke my heart. Full of emotion, grief, and love.
“He Who Takes the Pain Away” – Bizarre tale that just captivated me. Has a character called “The Black Man” who is also in other stories. I like the continuity of this.
“The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason” – this short novella was the perfect end to an already strong collection. This is such a beautiful story of loss and struggle and hope.
I need more from Chesya Burke. I love how her writing moves with ease from sharp and brutal, to the perfect, gorgeously formed, turn of phrase; whatever the story needs, she gives it. The reader gets taken to the depths of society, into worlds that are real yet unfamiliar, and all the while we can trust Burke to captivate us along the way. Read this book if you haven’t already, I definitely recommend it.
May 2, 2011
Very painful, very powerful reading.
A lot of it about the post-Civil War black experience, and a lot of it about the current day black experience.
There were some that drove me to tears.
A lot of it about the post-Civil War black experience, and a lot of it about the current day black experience.
There were some that drove me to tears.
October 24, 2011
Easily deserves a 6th or 7th star. Without a doubt some of the best short fiction I've read in a very long time.
March 27, 2012
I dug it. Full review at Innsmouth Free Press: http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/?p=...
June 22, 2020
Short horror and dark fantasy stories that are so classic that it feels like you've read them before...
The stories here didn't blow me out of the water individually, but on every single one of them, I felt a sense of deja vu although I hadn't actually read a single one of these stories before. I think it's that the style is so clear and the ideas so big that I felt like I was reading Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson of Twilight Zone fame or something. No flashy style, just clarity and invention. There was even an approach to a zombie story that I hadn't read before.
Recommended if you like Richard Matheson.
The stories here didn't blow me out of the water individually, but on every single one of them, I felt a sense of deja vu although I hadn't actually read a single one of these stories before. I think it's that the style is so clear and the ideas so big that I felt like I was reading Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson of Twilight Zone fame or something. No flashy style, just clarity and invention. There was even an approach to a zombie story that I hadn't read before.
Recommended if you like Richard Matheson.
February 26, 2019
The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason was best story. Other than that I did like a lot of the ideas behind the stories but most of them were to short and open-ended for me. Really like the writing style of Chesya Burke though. Overall 3.5/5 stars.
September 5, 2019
Content Warning: racism, pregnancy, childbirth, deaths (including the death of a child), rape, domestic violence, and miscarriage. This will otherwise be a spoiler-free review, and I will not be going into detail about any of these topics here.
As much as I’d love to write a full-length review of all eleven stories in this anthology, doing so would have inflated this post to five or six thousand words at minimum because each one was set in its own unique universe. What I decide to do instead was to pick a few of the stories I enjoyed the most that weren’t mentioned in the blurb and talk about why I liked them so much. If any of these mini-reviews catches you attention, I highly recommend reading the whole anthology! It was well done and pretty interesting to read.
Purse
In “Purse,” a woman named Manyara battled anxious thoughts about the other passengers on the bus she was travelling on, especially when it came to a black man who was sitting near her. She was carrying thousands of dollars in her purse and worried she’d be robbed. This tale was filled with creative plot twists, so I’ll need to be mindful of what else I say about it.
What impressed me the most was how much effort I had to put in as a reader to figure out what was really happening on this bus ride. There was so much more going on with Manyara than she originally shared with the audience. This is something I’d recommend reading with as few assumptions about what is happening as your brain can handle.
What She Saw When They Flew Away
Grief doesn’t always end on a set schedule. Pearl, the main character of “What She Saw When They Flew Away,” had suffered a terrible loss before this tale began. Not only did she struggle to come to terms with it, she had even more trouble helping her daughter, Nayja, adapt to their new life together. Their sometimes-conflicting reactions to the same tragedy made me wonder what would happen by the final scene.
While I can’t say much else about their lives without giving away spoilers, I loved the metaphors Pearl used to explain how she was feeling even though I do wish she’d been given more time to show how they affected her life instead of simply telling the audience they were bringing up bittersweet memories.
Cue: Change
As the blurb mentioned, “Cue: Change” was set in a zombiepocalypse. These weren’t typical zombies, though, and their unpredictable effect on society was something I couldn’t have predicted ahead of time. I was fascinated by this twist on this monster. It was completely different from any other take on them I’ve read before, and it made me wish for more stories like this.
The humans also didn’t behave the way I’d normally expect them to in this sub-genre. Not only did they make calm, rational decisions, they stuck to their regular routines as much as they possibly could. This isn’t a common reaction to zombies, and it made me wish this was a full-length novel so I could get to know the characters even better than I did.
As much as I’d love to write a full-length review of all eleven stories in this anthology, doing so would have inflated this post to five or six thousand words at minimum because each one was set in its own unique universe. What I decide to do instead was to pick a few of the stories I enjoyed the most that weren’t mentioned in the blurb and talk about why I liked them so much. If any of these mini-reviews catches you attention, I highly recommend reading the whole anthology! It was well done and pretty interesting to read.
Purse
In “Purse,” a woman named Manyara battled anxious thoughts about the other passengers on the bus she was travelling on, especially when it came to a black man who was sitting near her. She was carrying thousands of dollars in her purse and worried she’d be robbed. This tale was filled with creative plot twists, so I’ll need to be mindful of what else I say about it.
What impressed me the most was how much effort I had to put in as a reader to figure out what was really happening on this bus ride. There was so much more going on with Manyara than she originally shared with the audience. This is something I’d recommend reading with as few assumptions about what is happening as your brain can handle.
What She Saw When They Flew Away
Grief doesn’t always end on a set schedule. Pearl, the main character of “What She Saw When They Flew Away,” had suffered a terrible loss before this tale began. Not only did she struggle to come to terms with it, she had even more trouble helping her daughter, Nayja, adapt to their new life together. Their sometimes-conflicting reactions to the same tragedy made me wonder what would happen by the final scene.
While I can’t say much else about their lives without giving away spoilers, I loved the metaphors Pearl used to explain how she was feeling even though I do wish she’d been given more time to show how they affected her life instead of simply telling the audience they were bringing up bittersweet memories.
Cue: Change
As the blurb mentioned, “Cue: Change” was set in a zombiepocalypse. These weren’t typical zombies, though, and their unpredictable effect on society was something I couldn’t have predicted ahead of time. I was fascinated by this twist on this monster. It was completely different from any other take on them I’ve read before, and it made me wish for more stories like this.
The humans also didn’t behave the way I’d normally expect them to in this sub-genre. Not only did they make calm, rational decisions, they stuck to their regular routines as much as they possibly could. This isn’t a common reaction to zombies, and it made me wish this was a full-length novel so I could get to know the characters even better than I did.
April 20, 2012
I imagine some readers might have avoided Chesya Burke's collection due to the title, convinced that the stories were not merely concerned with the black experience, but intended specifically for a black readership. To avoid Let's Play White for that reason would be a mistake, though, for any reader interested in a unique take on the horror and fantasy genres.
The stories in this collection take place in a variety of settings, both in terms of time and place. Some are contemporary and urban, while some of the most effective pieces take place decades ago in the American South. So much fantasy and horror fiction tends to happen in imaginary alternate worlds, yet Burke demonstrates there are plenty of compelling settings for stories in the real world outside the most common "present-day-big-city" approach.
It's my belief that a writer's technique and skill change most quickly early in their career, so first collections or early novels are quite often uneven. I'd say that's the case here. Though I appreciate stories that retain mystery, or that leave key questions unanswered, several stories here left me unsatisfied. In order to pull off the mysterious ending, it's necessary to engage the reader and provide some kind of payoff, even if there's not clean resolution. A few of the stories were a bit slight, less than fully formed, or ended too near where they began.
Having said that, the greater number of stories in the collection are quite accomplished. "Cue: Change" is an unusual take on the zombie tale, and also a bit of a change in terms of tone from the rest of the stories here. "What She Saw When She Flew Away" is an affecting tale about a young girl whose twin has died. Other favorites include the historical settings of “I Make People Do Bad Things” (about a brothel madame in mid-century Harlem) and “The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason,” a novella that takes up the last 1/3 of the book. The Ms. Mason of the title is a witch who travels through a number of small towns. In one, she tries to help young girls who may have powers similar to her own. Given enough space to flesh out her ideas a bit more here, Burke portrays the milieu with a lot of vividness and flavor.
Many first collections are internally inconsistent, but the better stories in Let's Play White more than justify the collection as a whole, and show Chesya Burke to be a capable writer worth following.
The stories in this collection take place in a variety of settings, both in terms of time and place. Some are contemporary and urban, while some of the most effective pieces take place decades ago in the American South. So much fantasy and horror fiction tends to happen in imaginary alternate worlds, yet Burke demonstrates there are plenty of compelling settings for stories in the real world outside the most common "present-day-big-city" approach.
It's my belief that a writer's technique and skill change most quickly early in their career, so first collections or early novels are quite often uneven. I'd say that's the case here. Though I appreciate stories that retain mystery, or that leave key questions unanswered, several stories here left me unsatisfied. In order to pull off the mysterious ending, it's necessary to engage the reader and provide some kind of payoff, even if there's not clean resolution. A few of the stories were a bit slight, less than fully formed, or ended too near where they began.
Having said that, the greater number of stories in the collection are quite accomplished. "Cue: Change" is an unusual take on the zombie tale, and also a bit of a change in terms of tone from the rest of the stories here. "What She Saw When She Flew Away" is an affecting tale about a young girl whose twin has died. Other favorites include the historical settings of “I Make People Do Bad Things” (about a brothel madame in mid-century Harlem) and “The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason,” a novella that takes up the last 1/3 of the book. The Ms. Mason of the title is a witch who travels through a number of small towns. In one, she tries to help young girls who may have powers similar to her own. Given enough space to flesh out her ideas a bit more here, Burke portrays the milieu with a lot of vividness and flavor.
Many first collections are internally inconsistent, but the better stories in Let's Play White more than justify the collection as a whole, and show Chesya Burke to be a capable writer worth following.
March 1, 2014
My second Women in Horror Month read. (Only managed 2 this year, but what a great 2!) This book does something I have rarely seen accomplished well in fiction: It makes injustice and the sense of being socially trapped in a sick system the root of an awful, claustrophobic, paralyzing fear--without going very far at all from the real world. (That said, the speculative elements are well-chosen and anything but run of the mill.) The stories in this collection are filled with sharp bites that leave you worrying how they might fester if you dwell too long on them. And that's the thing... you have no choice but to dwell on them. People who are looking for something different from the usual horror--and who aren't afraid to look ugly realities in the face to see who flinches first--should read this collection.
January 30, 2016
I liked Burke's style and her characters' voices, and how she tackles the weird and horror. In the midst of all the stories "The Unremembered" hit me in the face with the worst disability trope, in this case . The rest of the collection was solid, with "Purse", "CUE: Change" and "The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason" among my favorites.
February 15, 2018
I can't say enough good things about this collection by Chesya Burke. All of the stories are gut-punching and memorable, unique, original, and gripping to read, especially the piece "The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason." Just amazing. This book deserves a much wider readership and far wider recognition for its excellence.
October 1, 2011
I was really excited to read this collection but in the end the abrupt ending of most of the stories just left me feeling unsatisfied with the effort. The one exception was the zombie story "CUE: Change" which I really enjoyed.
August 15, 2020
3.5⭐️
A collection of short stories that dances between horror, speculative fiction, fantasy and straight-up grim reality. Stories of race, privilege, the Black experience, family, magic, life and death, Let’s Play White is a stunning little collection. While some stories absolutely mesmerized, I found the organization of the collection a little uneven. One story would transport and teach, and the next would just fall a little flat. I am, however, a forever-fan of Burke’s prose—rich, lyrical and thought-provoking. She is also a lover of the ambiguous ending, which can leave you either in a state of contemplation or rage!
A few stand out stories:
Walter and the Three-Legged King: Politics, poverty, systemic oppression and a sentient rat!
Chocolate Park: Hands down my favourite of the collection, Chocolate Park explores the lives and relationships of three sisters. Forever affected by tragedy, this story explores what it means to slip through the cracks like ghosts in an unjust world. Haunting, visceral, triggering and with prose that will stab you in the heart.
CUE: Change: A zombie apocalypse, but with a revolutionary twist!
Purse: The shortest story in the collection, but possibly the most affecting. A woman rides the NYC subway and clutches her purse like she’s got the whole world inside.
Would definitely read more from Chesya Burke in the future!
A collection of short stories that dances between horror, speculative fiction, fantasy and straight-up grim reality. Stories of race, privilege, the Black experience, family, magic, life and death, Let’s Play White is a stunning little collection. While some stories absolutely mesmerized, I found the organization of the collection a little uneven. One story would transport and teach, and the next would just fall a little flat. I am, however, a forever-fan of Burke’s prose—rich, lyrical and thought-provoking. She is also a lover of the ambiguous ending, which can leave you either in a state of contemplation or rage!
A few stand out stories:
Walter and the Three-Legged King: Politics, poverty, systemic oppression and a sentient rat!
Chocolate Park: Hands down my favourite of the collection, Chocolate Park explores the lives and relationships of three sisters. Forever affected by tragedy, this story explores what it means to slip through the cracks like ghosts in an unjust world. Haunting, visceral, triggering and with prose that will stab you in the heart.
CUE: Change: A zombie apocalypse, but with a revolutionary twist!
Purse: The shortest story in the collection, but possibly the most affecting. A woman rides the NYC subway and clutches her purse like she’s got the whole world inside.
Would definitely read more from Chesya Burke in the future!
May 1, 2015
In "Let's Play White," a collection of dark fantasy and horror short fiction, Chesya Burke "weaves African and African-American historical legend and standard horror themes into stories that range from gritty subway gore fests to a sympathetic take on zombies.[1]" The stories explore not only issues of race, but also of power, need, loss, and all the other darker elements of human existence to create fiction that is more than simply macabre. These stories grab the reader and demand that she think about where the horror comes from, and why. As the blurb on the publisher's website notes,
"White brings with it dreams of respect, of wealth, of simply being treated as a human being. It's the one thing Walter will never be. But what if he could play white, the way so many others seem to do? Would it bring him privilege or simply deny the pain? The title story in this collection [Walter and the Three-Legged King] asks those questions, and then moves on to challenge notions of race, privilege, personal choice, and even life and death with equal vigor."
The stories that spoke to me most strongly in this collection were:
"Purse," in which a human tragedy reveals itself in the course of a subway ride;
"I Make People Do Bad Things," based on the life of Harlem gang leader Stephanie "Queenie" St. Clair, which postulates a chilling source for her power;
"The Unremembered," in which a dying girl's transformation and power come from a forgotten past;
"Chocolate Park," a story of life and death in ghettoised urban America, of drug dealing and prostitution, spousal and child abuse, rape and murder, of some who get out and others who stay behind to wreak a terrible revenge;
"The Room Where Ben Disappeared," in which a man returns home to face a memory of childhood; and
"The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason," in which a woman with special gifts pays a terrible price to pass her knowledge and calling on to two young girls.
[1] http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1...
"White brings with it dreams of respect, of wealth, of simply being treated as a human being. It's the one thing Walter will never be. But what if he could play white, the way so many others seem to do? Would it bring him privilege or simply deny the pain? The title story in this collection [Walter and the Three-Legged King] asks those questions, and then moves on to challenge notions of race, privilege, personal choice, and even life and death with equal vigor."
The stories that spoke to me most strongly in this collection were:
"Purse," in which a human tragedy reveals itself in the course of a subway ride;
"I Make People Do Bad Things," based on the life of Harlem gang leader Stephanie "Queenie" St. Clair, which postulates a chilling source for her power;
"The Unremembered," in which a dying girl's transformation and power come from a forgotten past;
"Chocolate Park," a story of life and death in ghettoised urban America, of drug dealing and prostitution, spousal and child abuse, rape and murder, of some who get out and others who stay behind to wreak a terrible revenge;
"The Room Where Ben Disappeared," in which a man returns home to face a memory of childhood; and
"The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason," in which a woman with special gifts pays a terrible price to pass her knowledge and calling on to two young girls.
[1] http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1...
August 8, 2016
Chesya Burke's collection of short stories imbues the lives and experiences of African Americans, past and present, with genre elements like ghosts, demons, and zombies. The combination works well in some stories, but others fell flat for me.
I was most impressed by “CUE: Change,” a zombie narrative that plays with expectations and is probably the most original and well-developed piece in the collection. I also enjoyed Burke's detailed depictions of urban life in “Walter and the Three-Legged King” and “Chocolate Park.”
There were other stories that disappointed me because I wanted more from them. Stories like “Walter and the Three-Legged King” and “He Who Takes the Pain Away” start with great concepts, but end too quickly without developing their ideas thoroughly. The titular act (“let's play white”) is mentioned in “Walter,” but Walter is never literally shown “playing white” so the story's social commentary falls flat. “The Unremembered” was my least favorite story in the collection because I disagreed with the story's use of its autistic main character. Burke's prose style stuck out to me as well; it's too simple at times, and I wish some of the fantastic subjects would have been treated with more nuanced language.
For readers seeking more diversity in their genre fiction, this collection fulfills that desire: all stories feature black characters, and the majority of the protagonists are women. I enjoyed the focus on women and the relationships between mothers, daughters, and sisters that are the foundation of so many of the stories. Burke has some strong ideas, but the execution of those ideas is not always satisfying.
I was most impressed by “CUE: Change,” a zombie narrative that plays with expectations and is probably the most original and well-developed piece in the collection. I also enjoyed Burke's detailed depictions of urban life in “Walter and the Three-Legged King” and “Chocolate Park.”
There were other stories that disappointed me because I wanted more from them. Stories like “Walter and the Three-Legged King” and “He Who Takes the Pain Away” start with great concepts, but end too quickly without developing their ideas thoroughly. The titular act (“let's play white”) is mentioned in “Walter,” but Walter is never literally shown “playing white” so the story's social commentary falls flat. “The Unremembered” was my least favorite story in the collection because I disagreed with the story's use of its autistic main character. Burke's prose style stuck out to me as well; it's too simple at times, and I wish some of the fantastic subjects would have been treated with more nuanced language.
For readers seeking more diversity in their genre fiction, this collection fulfills that desire: all stories feature black characters, and the majority of the protagonists are women. I enjoyed the focus on women and the relationships between mothers, daughters, and sisters that are the foundation of so many of the stories. Burke has some strong ideas, but the execution of those ideas is not always satisfying.
October 29, 2015
It took me a while to get into this one. I read the first couple stories and they seemed alright, but didn't quite click with me. I persisted. And then I hit one of my worst periods mental health-wise in months, and suddenly I 'got' it. Burke's stories bring to life all your deepest anxieties, fears, terrors. She takes the violence people suffer through in our society every day - things like poverty, joblessness, racism, sexual violence - and she gives it an embodiment outside the mind and flesh of her characters. Being white when most of her characters are Black, I could only really understand a small part of what they were going through. But I still found reading these stories oddly cathartic. What if the things you are most terrified of in your life, the worst stories you tell about yourself, came to life and you could look them in the eye?
September 2, 2015
Let's Play White by Chesya Burke is an excellent collection of nameless myths, darkness and hope. Burke tugs readers through shadowy places where hope still tries to linger, even if the people have given up. She also takes us to places where light is strong and vibrant, but people can't accept it. A wonderful collection, highly recommended, my favorites are the urban voodoo-themed ″Chocolate Park″ and the powerful rural fantasy novella ″The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason″.
I did a story by story live Tweet as I read. You can read it at michelelee.net/2012/02/14/storyeachni...
I did a story by story live Tweet as I read. You can read it at michelelee.net/2012/02/14/storyeachni...
March 13, 2013
What I like best about these eleven stories, which range in tone from the fantastic to the horrific, is that Burke writes about people and situations I rarely get to read about in speculative fiction. Not just the African-American experience, though that's different enough in itself from what you find in run of the mill speculative fiction, but characters who are down and out, who are at the end of their ropes, who are blamed for things they didn't do and know damn well why. Burke has a strong point of view as a writer, and I look forward to seeing more from her.
February 21, 2021
CUE: Change by Chesya Burke reminded me of a short story I read earlier this week . (Don't click on the spoiler unless you have already read CUE: Change, because the title of that other story would be a big spoiler for where this one goes.) I liked that other story quite a bit, and I thought it was an interesting idea. This story takes a similar notion and takes it broader places, which I really enjoyed.
March 26, 2015
A short story collection, mostly but not all speculative. Some very raw and rough stories - lots of emotion, some more speculative than others. I particularly liked the novella that ends the collection, and found her zombie story a refreshingly new take.
This author is still in college, I think, by her bio - so I imagine she will achieve astonishing heights if she's already writing stuff this powerful!
This author is still in college, I think, by her bio - so I imagine she will achieve astonishing heights if she's already writing stuff this powerful!
March 6, 2015
Elsewhere, someone described this collection to me as "raw" and that seems like exactly the right word. The characters and the situations are unvarnished and honest and it's not always comfortable, nor is it meant to be. "CUE: Change" is unlike any zombie story I've ever read before, in a world where there is a veritable flood of zombie stories, and "The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason" is really the one story above any other that's going to stick with me.
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March 3, 2012
I thought this book was great, but man, you need to schedule about twenty minutes between stories just for time to decompress. They're short stories, but they're really rich, and I couldn't go just straight from one into the next.
I also thought they were exceptionally scary, but more scary like THE ORPHANAGE than scary like THE SHINING.
I also thought they were exceptionally scary, but more scary like THE ORPHANAGE than scary like THE SHINING.
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