8/4/26
Pre Orders for the signed, limited edition of FALLING ANGELS: The Labyrinth Book 4 begin this Sunday, August 9, exclusively via Thunderstorm Books. If you would like more details or a sneak peek at the signature sheets, I’ve recorded this free video.
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I think most long-time readers know I’m the world’s biggest Phantasm fan. Enough so that in the notes I’m making for my forthcoming autobiography, there’s an entire chapter about the movie (which I realize I’ll have to edit down to a few paragraphs).
The ‘Cuda is every bit as iconic and essential to the Phantasm franchise as everyone’s favorite former ice cream vendor turned sphere slayer. My sincere thanks to Don Coscarelli and Fright Rags for gifting me this Phantastic new addition to my wardrobe.
If you would like one for yourself, Fright Rags has them available here.
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Are you enjoying Women In Horror Year? If so, don’t forget about this handy index which collects links to every book I’ve covered so far.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 94
The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
Hardcover - Paperback - eBook - Audiobook
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner New York Times Notable Book Locus Award Finalist Winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Award *
“You’re in for a treat...one of those books you can’t put down...Due hit it out of the park.” —Stephen King
A gripping, page-turning “masterpiece” (Joe Hill, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman) set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.
Gracetown, Florida.
June 1950.
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules, but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.
The Reformatory is a “hallucinatory, haunting, terrifying, and moving” (S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of All the Sinners Bleed) work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.
There was a discussion at GenCon this past weekend about how many writers of color there are in the horror genre now versus back in the late 1990s when we were starting out. Linda Addison, L.A. Banks, Wrath James White, Maurice Broaddus, J. F. Gonzalez, Lamar Giles, and Chesya Burke were named, and then someone else pointed out that Tananarive Due was hitting the scene around that time, too — something that many, including myself, are guilty of sometimes forgetting. Now, for me personally, I think the reason I forget that is because I didn’t yet know her like I knew Linda, Wrath, Maurice, or Jesus. She wasn’t doing poetry slams in my living room like Linda, or sharing a one-bed hotel room at a convention with me, Maurice, Wrath, and Jesus (because that’s all we could collectively afford). And though it was nominated for a 1996 Bram Stoker Award, The Between came out in 1995 — the year of the beginning of the Great Horror Crash, so a lot of hardcore horror fans missed it entirely.
Linda Addison, Gerard Houarner, and me in my living room, circa 2000. Photo by Ann Laymon. Linda did a poetry reading that I still remember to this day.
The Between was Tananarive’s first novel. In a review of the novel for The New York Times, James Polk described it as "Part horror novel, part detective story and part speculative fiction, The Between is a mix of genres. Yet it is no hybrid. It is a finely honed work that always engages and frequently surprises."
I sometimes suspect that cross-genre element might have contributed to the perception that Tananarive’s stuff appealed more to fans of fantasy, dark fantasy, or literary fiction than it did to fans of horror. Which is unfortunate and unfair, since cross-genre stuff has been an element of horror going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. But there have always been gatekeepers and snobs and purists in any sort of fandom, and Horror fiction is no different. So, while Tananarive’s works were winning American Book Awards, and NAACP Awards, and Locus Awards, and World Fantasy Awards, her nominations for various horror-centric literary awards (Stokers, IHG, etc) were always met with a portion of the audience murmuring “Is it really horror, though? Isn’t it literary fiction? Isn’t it fantasy?”
Which is why it is particularly gratifying to note that all of those people shut the f*ck up in 2023 when The Reformatory was released. Loosely based on the atrocities committed at the Dozier School for Boys (Tananarive’s great-uncle was one of the boys who died there), The Reformatory is Tananarive Due at full power — a crystallization and distillation of everything she’s been doing since the publication of The Between over thirty years before. Yes, it’s a literary novel. Yes, it’s hisorical fiction. But it is unmistakably and unabashedly a HORROR novel, in all caps, dealing with both the supernatural (in the form of ghosts and hoodoo) and a cast of all-too-real human monsters. Indeed, it is from the latter that most of the horror springs.
The Reformatory is a high-water mark for our entire genre. We are currently in what Christopher Golden and I believe to be the Second Golden Age of Horror Fiction. I firmly believe that thirty years from now, when critics and genre historians look back on this age, The Reformatory is one of the books they will all unanimously point to as one of the seminal contributions of the era. It’s a trojan Horse of a horror novel — one you can hand that parent, teacher, or spouse who belittles your preferred choice of genre, the ones who declare “I would never read a horror novel”. And when they’ve finished it, and love it, you can tell them to shut the f*ck up, too.
The Reformatory is available in hardcover, paperback, eBook, and audiobook from Simon & Schuster.
