Jordan Peele (writer/director of acclaimed movies Get Out, Us and Nope) presents this anthology of 19 short stories from black voices of horror fiction, co-edited by John Joseph Adams. Featuring a line-up of award-winning writers, Out There Screaming won the 2023 Bram Stoker award for superior achievement in a horror anthology.
Like any collection of short stories, this is a mixed bag of delights but there’s something here for everyone. The collection veers from N.K. Jemisin’s twisted tale of police brutality and body horror through to tales of spiritual traditions like obeah and juju, even taking a few detours into Black Mirror-esque science fiction dystopias. Many of these stories deal explicitly with the horrors of historical and present day black lived experiences: slavery, life under Jim Crow, everyday racism and sexism; meanwhile others are simply black writers telling their horror stories. One or two of the stories didn’t really land for me, but the vast majority of these had me in their thrall.
In terms of stand-out stories, Violet Allen’s The Other One grabs the reader hard. Our heart-broken narrator is sending text messages to her ex-lover into a void of silence… until one day she receives a jarring reply followed by threats and demands for money: “lol, why are u texting my boyfriend?”
In Tananarive Due’s The Rider, two young civil rights activists realise that their bus will never get them to their demonstration. Invasion of the Baby Snatchers by Lesley Nneka Arimah is a wild ride that wears its X-files influences on its sleeve right from its killer opening:
“Used to be, you could tell an alien pregnancy from a human one with your naked eye, back before they’d figured people out…. But of course, they learned.”
In Your Happy Place, Terence Taylor channels the uncanny feeling of Peel’s own Get Out when a prisoner discovers the horrifying secret between a new reform programme for inmates.
As a white reader, I’m sure there were details and layers here that I simply missed and I can’t help but wonder what those were and how it would have affected my reading experience. Out There Screaming is a thought-provoking and chilling anthology that will send readers scurrying away to track down the other works of writers included here. I would love to see this title reprinted in a few years time with the addendum “Volume 1” for the sake of clarity, because it had since become the first in a series.
Out There Screaming was published in paperback earlier this month and is currently available on Kindle for just 99p. Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for providing a digital advance review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
