The Black Girl Survives in This One

Using authentic voices to detail Black experiences through a horror lens, debut creator Evans and Fennell (Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed) aim to ensure that Black girls survive their gruesome respective situations via a stellar lineup of 15 Black writers—including Zakiya Dahlia Harris, Justina Ireland, and Brittney Morris—in this unforgettable collaboration. L.L. McKinney sets the tone with the fast-paced, spine-chilling “Harvesters,” in which teens attend a house party that goes awry and end up being hunted by monsters in a “ghost corn” field. Other stories feature genre-bending themes of fantasy, romance, and sci-fi; Kortney Nash’s “Welcome Back to the Cosmos” paints a terrorizing picture of a space explorer struggling to do her job while remembering the myths her mother told her about beings “stealing faces.” Through vivid dialogue and descriptions of ancestral practices like hoodoo, Black culture remains at the forefront of each story, as in anthology editor Desiree S. Evans’s “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou,” in which a Black teen fights a demon that for generations has been abducting girls from one family the day they turn 19. An insightful foreword by Tananarive Due outlines a brief history of how Black girls are portrayed in horror. Ages 12–up. (Apr.)