Justin C. Key: Roller Coaster

JUSTIN CARLYLE KEY was born June 18, 1987, in Washington DC, where he grew up. He studied biology at Stanford University, attended medical school, and is now a practicing psychiatrist.

He began publishing genre fiction with “The Roller Coaster” in 2012, and his stories have appeared in F&SF, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Out There Screaming, and other magazines and anthologies. Notable stories include novelette “One Hand in the Coffin” (2020) an Ignyte Award finalist, and audio serial/ebook Spider King (2021). His collection The World Wasn’t Ready for You appeared in 2023, and a debut SF novel is forthcoming.

In addition to his fiction, Key wrote a writing advice blog for many years at Scribophile.com, and has also written professionally about health and wellness. He lives in Los Angeles CA with his wife, two sons, and daughter.

Excerpt from the interview:

“The World Wasn’t Ready for You is a collection of eight short stories that I think of as my love letter to speculative fiction. People who have bragged on me say it shows my range in writing horror, sci-fi, and urban fantasy. It’s also a representation of my journey with writing over the past ten years. There are stories that tap into my background, and my lineage as a descendant of slaves, going back to that time, thinking about the horrors of my background. I was able to go online and look at what planta­tion I’m a descendant from – I was able to find my grandma’s name and then their parent and their parent, etc. Then I had to think, ‘Okay, what is it I really want to say about this? Do I have something that’s worth saying?’ I was able to be very authentic about it, and did a lot of research of firsthand ac­counts and slave narratives.

“I also drew on going into medicine and becom­ing a doctor, seeing the disparities that still exist in medicine, and knowing that medicine has a really dark history, especially in this country. Knowing the disparities that still exist, and exploring that on the page, and exploring them through horror. There’s a story in the collection, ‘Now You See’, about a medical resident going through my version of The Picture of Dorian Gray – this horrific experience where they’re losing their identity and their autonomy, and it’s really supposed to reflect what it means to be a Black woman in America: Being hypercriticized, and then being ignored. The medicine piece involves the disparities in peripartum mortality in Black women. I also draw on becoming a psychiatrist, and dealing with being a mental health professional. I have a sci-fi story in there called ‘The Perfection of Theresa Watkins’ that deals with mental illness and autonomy, and with love in the face of death. I also go back to the things that got me inspired as a child. There’s a horror story about a possessed therapy doll, with kid protagonists. I wrote ‘One Hand in the Coffin’ at Clarion West, and as I was writing it, I realized it had just become the anniversary of my cousin’s murder, and I was writing the story about him – he’s in it, the character is named after him, and it was me dealing with that trauma. It’s not a one-to-one retelling of that experience, but it became a story about dealing with loss, and also dealing with the loss of someone who was an abuser – my cousin wasn’t abusive to me, but that’s what it became in this story.

“I also love to laugh, and I love humor, and since a lot of the things I write can be dark and heavy, I have some lighthearted stories in there as well. I have ‘Customer Service’, which is a fun, ridiculous horror story about a service that offers clones, and the person who’s gotten the service is trying to cancel his service and get his clone taken away, and customer service is being very difficult while his world is crumbling around him. Also, going through the pandemic, and being aware that the pandemic is something that’s been collectively traumatizing, that’s going to come out in my writ­ing, but I don’t want to add to the misery – we all know how much it sucked. So I wrote a love story called ‘Wellness Check’ that deals with heavy parts of the pandemic, but ends up being more uplifting.

“The titular story, ‘The World Wasn’t Ready for You’, is really about my journey as a father, and going through 2020 and specifically with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor – and those are just the ones we knew the most about. The story is about raising African-American children and seeing how people think they’re so cute and complimenting their hair, but when they grow and become adults, some people are going to automatically think of them as threats. That story deals with that in a very deep way. The premise is being the father of an in­terspecies son – there’s this alien spaceship docked outside Earth, and they’ve become the marginal­ized population, and we mine their resources, etc. They’re the ones that have all this stigma, and the father knows that as his son grows, the world is go­ing to see him as a threat. With speculative fiction, I’m able to draw people in with some commonality, as opposed to losing somebody, because they don’t want to read about race. Instead, I can take the story out of that immediately recognizable scene, and then make the reader think. That’s the real power of speculative fiction, and The World Wasn’t Ready for You is me loving what the genre has done for me, and showcasing that in eight stories.

Interview design by Francesca Myman

Read the full interview in the September 2024 issue of Locus.

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