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Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now
Not yet published
Expected 24 Nov 26A stunning collection of Black American horror short stories curated by the prolific author-editor-scholar team of Maurice Broaddus and Dr. Chesya Burke.
Edited by award-winning writer, community organizer and educator Maurice Broaddus and scholar, professor and award-winning author Dr. Chesya Burke, with an introduction by Dr. Burke, Black Canonical Voices from Then to Now is a landmark anthology offering the evolution of Black American literary horror while boldly imagining its future. The stories within recognize the legacy of Black horror, its literary milestones, cultural roots, and innovative voices, while pushing the genre into new, daring territory. Authors featured in the anthology Tananarive Due, P. Djeli Clark, Linda D. Addison, Brandon Massey, Justina Ireland, Jewelle Gomez, Sheree Renee Thomas, Wrath James White and Victor Lavalle. It also includes a small selection of stories chosen from open submissions. This book revels in the power of horror to unsettle, illuminate, or transform, while drawing from Black American cultural histories, mythologies, and lived experiences; it will surprise you with fresh nightmares, folklore, and futures, honoring the past while writing fearlessly toward tomorrow.
The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.
Edited by award-winning writer, community organizer and educator Maurice Broaddus and scholar, professor and award-winning author Dr. Chesya Burke, with an introduction by Dr. Burke, Black Canonical Voices from Then to Now is a landmark anthology offering the evolution of Black American literary horror while boldly imagining its future. The stories within recognize the legacy of Black horror, its literary milestones, cultural roots, and innovative voices, while pushing the genre into new, daring territory. Authors featured in the anthology Tananarive Due, P. Djeli Clark, Linda D. Addison, Brandon Massey, Justina Ireland, Jewelle Gomez, Sheree Renee Thomas, Wrath James White and Victor Lavalle. It also includes a small selection of stories chosen from open submissions. This book revels in the power of horror to unsettle, illuminate, or transform, while drawing from Black American cultural histories, mythologies, and lived experiences; it will surprise you with fresh nightmares, folklore, and futures, honoring the past while writing fearlessly toward tomorrow.
The Flame Tree Beyond and Within short story collections bring together tales of myth and imagination by modern and contemporary writers, carefully selected by anthologists, and sometimes featuring short stories from a single author. Overall, the series presents a wide range of diverse and inclusive voices with myth, folkloric-inflected short fiction, and an emphasis on the supernatural, science fiction, the mysterious and the speculative. The books themselves are gorgeous, with foiled covers, printed edges and published only in hardcover editions, offering a lifetime of reading pleasure.
416 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication November 24, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Compiled by Dr Chesya Burke and Maurice Broaddus, Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now is a remarkably strong anthology, with contributions from Tananarive Due, Sheree Renee Thomas and Victor LaValle, to name but a few.
The stories featured were incredibly varied, from the disquieting ‘Night Doctors’, which is steeped in the most horrific of folklore, to the blood-splattered, disco-fevered ‘Love Hangover’, which features a vampire of a different kind.
Despite the talent displayed and the range shown, a genuine highlight for me was that each story had its own author’s note. It gave real insight into the stories themselves, making them much more memorable in the process. It’s something I wish we would see more of in short story collections.
Overall, an excellent read that does everything Burke and Broaddus intended. Highly recommended.
With thanks to Flame Tree Books for the ARC.
The stories featured were incredibly varied, from the disquieting ‘Night Doctors’, which is steeped in the most horrific of folklore, to the blood-splattered, disco-fevered ‘Love Hangover’, which features a vampire of a different kind.
Despite the talent displayed and the range shown, a genuine highlight for me was that each story had its own author’s note. It gave real insight into the stories themselves, making them much more memorable in the process. It’s something I wish we would see more of in short story collections.
Overall, an excellent read that does everything Burke and Broaddus intended. Highly recommended.
With thanks to Flame Tree Books for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
As soon as I heard that Maurice Broaddus and Dr. Chesya Burke were going to be the editors of a new anthology of Black Horror, and that it would include such phenomenal authors as Sheree Renee Thomas, Linda Addison, Wrath James white, and so many others, I knew that I needed to read a copy.
"Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now" comes out on November 24 of this year. Mark your calendars. Libraries who do their Black History Month displays for February will want to prepare now to place this title prominently and make sure to order multiple copies.
Please read every inch of this book, including the introductions.
In the first Foreword, Dr. Burke talks about the very first horror convention she attended, and how while there, she was called a racial slur invoking a racist caricature deeply embedded in American culture to this day, despite being removed from the pancake mix and maple syrup packaging that bore her face for decades. This event did not happen ages ago. It is still very recent. It was not the first time someone has disrespected Dr. Burke for carving out space for herself and other Black people in the horror world (which is still predominantly white and cis-hetero). It was not the last time that a Black author has faced such disrespect. And as Dr. Burke reminds readers, "...never once did any of those [white] voices consider that they also embodied the act of the horror they consumed when it came to the ferocity they enacted on the Black bodies simply sharing spaces with them."
Dr. Burke does not mince words and reminds people that the landscape of Black creatives in horror spaces has... yes, there has been progress, and yet at the same time, in many ways, there has not.
When Professor Tananarive Due won the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for her chilling novel, "The Reformatory," it was impossible to ignore that the last time a Black author had even been *nominated* for the Stoker Award in the category of Best Novel was Due herself, in 1997, for "My Soul to Keep" (the winner was 'Children of the Dusk' co-authored by Janet Berliner and George Guthridge). The years that followed were a parade of cis-het white man after cis-het white man who dominated the category every year until white female author Alice Sebold was nominated in 2002 for 'The Lovely Bones'; in the early 2000s, only 10 female authors would be nominees in the category still heavily dominated by other white male nominees and winners. It wasn't until 2018 when Alma Katsu was nominated for 'The Hunger' that a woman of colour was a contender for that category. It wasn't until 2019 that Native American author Owl Goingback won for his novel 'Coyote Rage' (he had a previous nomination in the mid-1990s). And even though since 2019, there have been more women and women of colour in particular, from Silvia Moreno-Garcia to V Castro being nominated increasingly, the field is far from being level or equal.
Burke reminds readers that even though there have been strides where there are now more than two Black authors at horror events, there is still a long way to go. The statistics are also very clear that white writers continue to be the predominant demographic whose works are published, particularly in horror. Publishing as an industry continues to be very white. Libraries and archives continue to have predominantly white staff and employees.
Drawing it back to Tananarive Due, Burke talks about how much it meant to discover her work at a time in the mid-1990s in particular, when many Black writers were not being published, or if they were, it was not from the Big 5 publishers. Burke also talks about the importance of selecting works from Black speculative fiction authors and those who certainly do write horror as part of their canon, like Nalo Hopkinson, but who aren't thought of as horror writers per se, or because Nalo for instance writes a broad spectrum of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, it's harder to categorize as Horror with a capital H.
The fact that there is still insipid debate over whether Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved" is Horror... is maddening. It is absolutely horror. And for this, Burke points to an essay she published in a 2016 issue of Nightmare Magazine talking about the underlying reasons for this 'debate,' which is white male writers being used to defining 'ABC is horror, but XYZ isn't,' which is... ridiculous, and needs to stop.
Dr. Burke very much worked toward making 'Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now' an extension and continuation of other seminal works in the field like Sheree Renee Thomas's 'Dark Matter' anthologies, Robin R. Means Coleman's 'Horror Noire,' the anthologies that Brandon Massey edited for Kensington, and many others.
As the co-editor, Burke also made great efforts to ensure she and Broaddus were selecting from a multiplicity of Black experiences.
The first story that starts is a Gilda story from Jewelle Gomez, famed author of 'The Gilda Stories,' one of the first representations of a Black vampire in horror fiction, and a landmark in queer fiction.
Next up is the Rusty Cundieff story "KKK Comeuppance" which had me hoping that the Klan would, in fact, get comeuppance that they so sorely deserve. The story's format is more of a film script, which was an interesting narrative choice. The story definitely takes on twists and turns and uses film conventions to turn things on their head. It reminded me of the same feeling of satisfaction I got when watching one of the mini-films of the 'Tales from the Hood' film anthology where a white politician finds out the hard way that you if you f*** around, you WILL find out.
"Little Red in the Hood" by Linda D. Addison reminded me of a Blaxploitation re-imagining of Little Red Riding Hood, taken to, as the title implies, the Hood as a place. Very interesting!
Brandon Massey's story "Granddad's Garage" is a reprint from 'Dark Dreams' in 1994, and as the author says in the after-note, it is about inheritance and trust, and how Black history 'is preserved not in museums, but in ordinary homes'
Victor LaValle offers "I Left My Heart in Skaftafell" which is inspired by the author's own trip to Iceland in the early 2000s in the aftermath of a breakup.
Co-editor Broaddus is up next with his story "Family Business," which incorporates the Jamaican parts of his heritage and duppy spirits. And in his author's note, Broaddus tells us that the World Horror Convention 2003 was a seminal one because it is where this story of his won the short fiction contest and was published in Weird Tales, and where Dr. Burke won a flash fiction contest, and Wrath James White came in second place for a Gross-Out Contest.
Next up is "Summer" from Tananarive Due, which is one of her strongest stories, set in the fictional Florida town called 'Gracetown,' but very much inspired by the author's own upbringing and history of her parents.
Wrath James White's "Scabs" comes up next, and I remember reading it in one of the Dark Dreams anthologies from Kensington, which has gone long-since out of print, but if you can find a used copy, is well worth it. It is one of Wrath's best stories, not only because it reflects so many of the nuances of being Black in America, particularly colorism, but also for establishing him as a master of extreme horror.
Dr. Burke's short story "CUE: Change" is next, and tackles zombies from a different point of view. It is her reclamation of them.
"Night Doctors" by P. Djeli Clark starts off with a historical quote from Cornelius Garner, who had been an enslaved person, quoted from an interview he gave in 1937 as part of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) major project of interviewing those who had been enslaved and recording what their experiences had been while that generation were alive. Clark talks about how he studied this as part of his research in graduate school, and how he became fascinated by the narratives of those who had been formerly enslaved, and some of the folklore he encountered in doing so. This would later on lead him to incoporate this concept into his novel 'Ring Shout' years later.
Justina Ireland's "Dread Quarter" takes place in the French Quarter of New Orleans. There is a Harvest Ball but the dead also walk the earth. It's a fascinating take on the real phenomenon of Q*****n Balls, which, although some scholars dispute the existence of, were places where mixed-race, particularly lighter-skinned Black women and girls would have concubinage arrangements set up with wealthy white (mostly French) men. While scholars who have researched these Balls in great depths, and done archival research do have a point about the fanciful ideas and lore surrounding them as not totally true, there are reliable records that demonstrate these types of arrangmenets, even if they did not take place at formal Balls, did occur, particularly in Louisiana.
It's a really lush, resplendent story, and I enjoyed it. If only "American Horror Story: Coven" (aka Season 3, and the upcoming Season 13 continuation) would have hired Ireland as one of the staff writers, things would have taken on a more interesting direction.
Sheree Renee Thomas presents "Love Hangover" which is a disco tale but addresses the events of the 1979 Infinity Disco fire in Columbus, Ohio, a devastating event that led to many people perishing. It is one of the Black vampire tales the author published in "Slay," the anthology, and talks about how Thomas was influenced by the Gilda Stories but also Ganja & Hess, and even Blacula.
It is a really fantastic anthology of Black voices in horror, and I hope that we will see many more such anthologies in the future.
"Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now" comes out on November 24 of this year. Mark your calendars. Libraries who do their Black History Month displays for February will want to prepare now to place this title prominently and make sure to order multiple copies.
Please read every inch of this book, including the introductions.
In the first Foreword, Dr. Burke talks about the very first horror convention she attended, and how while there, she was called a racial slur invoking a racist caricature deeply embedded in American culture to this day, despite being removed from the pancake mix and maple syrup packaging that bore her face for decades. This event did not happen ages ago. It is still very recent. It was not the first time someone has disrespected Dr. Burke for carving out space for herself and other Black people in the horror world (which is still predominantly white and cis-hetero). It was not the last time that a Black author has faced such disrespect. And as Dr. Burke reminds readers, "...never once did any of those [white] voices consider that they also embodied the act of the horror they consumed when it came to the ferocity they enacted on the Black bodies simply sharing spaces with them."
Dr. Burke does not mince words and reminds people that the landscape of Black creatives in horror spaces has... yes, there has been progress, and yet at the same time, in many ways, there has not.
When Professor Tananarive Due won the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for her chilling novel, "The Reformatory," it was impossible to ignore that the last time a Black author had even been *nominated* for the Stoker Award in the category of Best Novel was Due herself, in 1997, for "My Soul to Keep" (the winner was 'Children of the Dusk' co-authored by Janet Berliner and George Guthridge). The years that followed were a parade of cis-het white man after cis-het white man who dominated the category every year until white female author Alice Sebold was nominated in 2002 for 'The Lovely Bones'; in the early 2000s, only 10 female authors would be nominees in the category still heavily dominated by other white male nominees and winners. It wasn't until 2018 when Alma Katsu was nominated for 'The Hunger' that a woman of colour was a contender for that category. It wasn't until 2019 that Native American author Owl Goingback won for his novel 'Coyote Rage' (he had a previous nomination in the mid-1990s). And even though since 2019, there have been more women and women of colour in particular, from Silvia Moreno-Garcia to V Castro being nominated increasingly, the field is far from being level or equal.
Burke reminds readers that even though there have been strides where there are now more than two Black authors at horror events, there is still a long way to go. The statistics are also very clear that white writers continue to be the predominant demographic whose works are published, particularly in horror. Publishing as an industry continues to be very white. Libraries and archives continue to have predominantly white staff and employees.
Drawing it back to Tananarive Due, Burke talks about how much it meant to discover her work at a time in the mid-1990s in particular, when many Black writers were not being published, or if they were, it was not from the Big 5 publishers. Burke also talks about the importance of selecting works from Black speculative fiction authors and those who certainly do write horror as part of their canon, like Nalo Hopkinson, but who aren't thought of as horror writers per se, or because Nalo for instance writes a broad spectrum of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, it's harder to categorize as Horror with a capital H.
The fact that there is still insipid debate over whether Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved" is Horror... is maddening. It is absolutely horror. And for this, Burke points to an essay she published in a 2016 issue of Nightmare Magazine talking about the underlying reasons for this 'debate,' which is white male writers being used to defining 'ABC is horror, but XYZ isn't,' which is... ridiculous, and needs to stop.
Dr. Burke very much worked toward making 'Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now' an extension and continuation of other seminal works in the field like Sheree Renee Thomas's 'Dark Matter' anthologies, Robin R. Means Coleman's 'Horror Noire,' the anthologies that Brandon Massey edited for Kensington, and many others.
As the co-editor, Burke also made great efforts to ensure she and Broaddus were selecting from a multiplicity of Black experiences.
The first story that starts is a Gilda story from Jewelle Gomez, famed author of 'The Gilda Stories,' one of the first representations of a Black vampire in horror fiction, and a landmark in queer fiction.
Next up is the Rusty Cundieff story "KKK Comeuppance" which had me hoping that the Klan would, in fact, get comeuppance that they so sorely deserve. The story's format is more of a film script, which was an interesting narrative choice. The story definitely takes on twists and turns and uses film conventions to turn things on their head. It reminded me of the same feeling of satisfaction I got when watching one of the mini-films of the 'Tales from the Hood' film anthology where a white politician finds out the hard way that you if you f*** around, you WILL find out.
"Little Red in the Hood" by Linda D. Addison reminded me of a Blaxploitation re-imagining of Little Red Riding Hood, taken to, as the title implies, the Hood as a place. Very interesting!
Brandon Massey's story "Granddad's Garage" is a reprint from 'Dark Dreams' in 1994, and as the author says in the after-note, it is about inheritance and trust, and how Black history 'is preserved not in museums, but in ordinary homes'
Victor LaValle offers "I Left My Heart in Skaftafell" which is inspired by the author's own trip to Iceland in the early 2000s in the aftermath of a breakup.
Co-editor Broaddus is up next with his story "Family Business," which incorporates the Jamaican parts of his heritage and duppy spirits. And in his author's note, Broaddus tells us that the World Horror Convention 2003 was a seminal one because it is where this story of his won the short fiction contest and was published in Weird Tales, and where Dr. Burke won a flash fiction contest, and Wrath James White came in second place for a Gross-Out Contest.
Next up is "Summer" from Tananarive Due, which is one of her strongest stories, set in the fictional Florida town called 'Gracetown,' but very much inspired by the author's own upbringing and history of her parents.
Wrath James White's "Scabs" comes up next, and I remember reading it in one of the Dark Dreams anthologies from Kensington, which has gone long-since out of print, but if you can find a used copy, is well worth it. It is one of Wrath's best stories, not only because it reflects so many of the nuances of being Black in America, particularly colorism, but also for establishing him as a master of extreme horror.
Dr. Burke's short story "CUE: Change" is next, and tackles zombies from a different point of view. It is her reclamation of them.
"Night Doctors" by P. Djeli Clark starts off with a historical quote from Cornelius Garner, who had been an enslaved person, quoted from an interview he gave in 1937 as part of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) major project of interviewing those who had been enslaved and recording what their experiences had been while that generation were alive. Clark talks about how he studied this as part of his research in graduate school, and how he became fascinated by the narratives of those who had been formerly enslaved, and some of the folklore he encountered in doing so. This would later on lead him to incoporate this concept into his novel 'Ring Shout' years later.
Justina Ireland's "Dread Quarter" takes place in the French Quarter of New Orleans. There is a Harvest Ball but the dead also walk the earth. It's a fascinating take on the real phenomenon of Q*****n Balls, which, although some scholars dispute the existence of, were places where mixed-race, particularly lighter-skinned Black women and girls would have concubinage arrangements set up with wealthy white (mostly French) men. While scholars who have researched these Balls in great depths, and done archival research do have a point about the fanciful ideas and lore surrounding them as not totally true, there are reliable records that demonstrate these types of arrangmenets, even if they did not take place at formal Balls, did occur, particularly in Louisiana.
It's a really lush, resplendent story, and I enjoyed it. If only "American Horror Story: Coven" (aka Season 3, and the upcoming Season 13 continuation) would have hired Ireland as one of the staff writers, things would have taken on a more interesting direction.
Sheree Renee Thomas presents "Love Hangover" which is a disco tale but addresses the events of the 1979 Infinity Disco fire in Columbus, Ohio, a devastating event that led to many people perishing. It is one of the Black vampire tales the author published in "Slay," the anthology, and talks about how Thomas was influenced by the Gilda Stories but also Ganja & Hess, and even Blacula.
It is a really fantastic anthology of Black voices in horror, and I hope that we will see many more such anthologies in the future.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
ARC from NetGalley
This was a really wonderful collection! Many of the greats were included, and I absolutely loved the editors' decision to allow the authors to choose their own submissions and write notes explaining why they chose that particular piece. I learned so much from those afterwords, and I think it made this collection feel different from other anthologies in a way I really appreciated. I would have liked to see some older works (the farthest back "then" encompasses is The Gilda Stories), even if it meant no authors' notes. But a lot of the things I would have liked to see are covered by Dark Matter, and this collection already sits at 400 pages with only this more contemporary focus, so it's more of a nitpick than a serious issue with this collection. It encompassed a pretty wide range of approaches to Black horror, and the inclusion of screenplays and poetry in addition to short stories was a great touch. My bookstore stocks a lot of Flame Tree Press's anthologies, which are absolutely gorgeous hardcovers, so I'm beyond excited to get to see this one in print soon!
This was a really wonderful collection! Many of the greats were included, and I absolutely loved the editors' decision to allow the authors to choose their own submissions and write notes explaining why they chose that particular piece. I learned so much from those afterwords, and I think it made this collection feel different from other anthologies in a way I really appreciated. I would have liked to see some older works (the farthest back "then" encompasses is The Gilda Stories), even if it meant no authors' notes. But a lot of the things I would have liked to see are covered by Dark Matter, and this collection already sits at 400 pages with only this more contemporary focus, so it's more of a nitpick than a serious issue with this collection. It encompassed a pretty wide range of approaches to Black horror, and the inclusion of screenplays and poetry in addition to short stories was a great touch. My bookstore stocks a lot of Flame Tree Press's anthologies, which are absolutely gorgeous hardcovers, so I'm beyond excited to get to see this one in print soon!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews