Alex Brown Reviews The Black Girl Survives in This One edited by Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell
The Black Girl Survives in This One, Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell, eds. (Flatiron 978-1-25032-199-2, $19.99, 368pp, hc) April 2024.
Horror is in a golden age in young adult fiction. Just a few years ago, you could count the number of YA horror novels released each year on one hand. Last year I tracked more than 30 YA books marketed as horror. This year just in January through June we’ve had 14. What do most of those books have in common? They typically feature white characters. Black characters, especially Black girls, rarely get to be the star. The new anthology from Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell, The Black Girl Survives in This One, aims to rectify that imbalance. The 15 short stories largely break down into two camps: stories that explore how Blackness affects and is affected by horror tropes, and familiar horror stories that happen to have Black characters in them. Black audiences deserve both. Sometimes you want social horror in the vein of Get Out and sometimes you just want a slasher with people who look like you. Horror queen Tananarive Due opens the anthology with a bit of a history lesson – she is a professor of Black horror and Afrofuturism after all. She takes us through a brief history of Black women in horror, from the 1936 film Ouanga through to Jordan Peele’s Us. With that foundation under our feet, the reason for the anthology becomes clear: “Can we live?”
As much as I enjoyed all of the stories, a few stuck out to me. “Harvesters” by L.L. McKinney opens the anthology with a classic trope, monsters in a corn field. Two teen girls are chilling at a party and meet up with two cute boys. When they cut through a corn field, things go sideways in a really distressing way. Who is the monster and who is real? McKinney doesn’t have any other horror credits to her name, but based solely on the ending of this story, if she ever decides to write a YA horror novel, you can bet I’ll be there ready to buy it on release day.
Eden Royce knocks it out of the park with “Local Color”, because of course she does. You can’t talk Black horror without invoking her hallowed name. Veronne is desperate to learn what happened to her parents, who are missing and presumed dead overseas. A search for treasure to fund her trip to find them leads her to something else entirely. When Veronne breaks the only rule on her treasure map, dangerous creatures come out to play. A dark story with a hopeful ending, all wrapped up with the Southern Gothic flair Royce is known for.
Also entertaining were “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou” by Desiree S. Evans, where a young woman returns to her ancestral home in rural Louisiana to break a curse; we get slavery, demon deals, and generational trauma. We jump back to the 1970s with Justina Ireland’s “Black Pride”. Maisie, about to enroll at Howard, joins her friends for a summer trip out to a lake, but their vacation is interrupted by something werewolf-esque eating white folks. Kortney Nash takes us to space with “Welcome Back to the Cosmos”. Danika and her salvage crew sneak aboard an abandoned space factory that turns out to be haunted. Even in space, the dead don’t stay dead.
Fans of horror, both young adults and adults, would do well to pick up a copy of The Black Girl Survives in This One. It has a little bit of everything, from messages to camp, from monsters to mayhem, from evil spirits to Big Bads. And if you haven’t already, take this as a reminder to pick up another Black girl YA horror novel, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight, by Kalynn Bayron.
Alex Brown is a librarian, author, historian, and Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, young adult fiction, librarianship, and Black history.
This review and more like it in the August 2024 issue of Locus.
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