Of course Tananarive Due would be conducting an interview from her car. A luminary in the Black horror lit revival, Due has been ridiculously busy over the last few years. She teaches at UCLA. A while back, Jordon Peele showed up to her course “Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and Black Horror Aesthetic,” to the rapt surprise of her students. She executive produced the engaging and timely documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. Due and Steven Barnes, her husband, ace collaborator, and a fellow horror head and SF author, have a podcast, Lifewriting: Write for Your Life!, which takes on questions of craft and life balance with verve and generosity.

On a recent episode, the duo sounded giddy as they spoke about participating in television writer and showrunner Bryan Fuller’s writerly think tank for a prequel series called Crystal Lake. (Yes, Jason Vorhees trackers, that Crystal Lake.) The two met in 1997 at a Black science fiction, fantasy and horror conference at Clark Atlanta University.

The daughter of Florida civil rights activists, Due co-wrote the memoir Freedom in the Family with her mother, who died in 2012. (“I consider it the most important book I’ve ever written,” she says.) Many of her stories and novels unfold in Florida.

“These tales of fright are both intellectually keen and psychologically bloodcurdling,” begins our starred review of Due’s new story collection, The Wishing Pool and Other Stories (Akashic, April 18). Later this year, her novel The Reformatory will be published. We caught up with her as she was headed to a movie her Crystal Lake cohort were interested in: the sixth installment of the Scream franchise. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

In the Wishing Pool preface you confess your love for the short story form. Why?

It’s the form I first embraced when I became serious about learning how to be a professional writer. I had novels in progress in high school and in college, but it seems to me that I only started really learning the lessons I needed to create consistently professional level work, to conjure scenes and characters, through short stories. After my first collection, Ghost Summer, was published [in 2015], my short story writing just accelerated. I was writing fewer novels because I was learning screenwriting.

What’s going on in film and television horror that excites you?

What am I not excited about? The word renaissance gets overused, but we are absolutely in the thick of a Black horror renaissance. And it’s not that Black horror didn’t exist before Jordan Peele and Get Out in 2017, but on the cinema side, that was so clarifying for the film industry. It just opened all kinds of doors. Horror Noire got the green light the same day Jordan Peele won an Oscar [for best original screenplay]. It’s not just that Black horror got more recognition after Get Out. I’ve seen more Indigenous horror. I’ve seen more queer horror. We just watched a movie with two Asian American women as the leads. Everybody’s having more of a turn in the sun right now. And on the literary side, don’t get me started.

But I must get you started.

Oh, my gosh. I mean, you have Alma Katsu and Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. But Black horror literature? Holy cow. I’ve never seen anything like it. I just read Jackal by Erin Adams, who, for me, came out of nowhere. Then I jumped right into Spite House by Johnny Compton. Any day now, I get to start Victor LaValle’s Lone Women. Three in a row, barely waiting in between for them. For Black horror readers, I don’t know that we’ve ever had a time that was so rich.

What’s going on?

Part of it is destigmatizing genre. When I went to Northwestern University, I had very fine creative writing instructors. No creative writing instructor ever told me not to write horror. Very early in one of the workshops, we were asked to name our favorite authors. I said, “Toni Morrison.” Everybody nodded and smiled. And then I said, “And Stephen King.” And everybody just gaped. They didn’t know you were allowed to mention a commercial writer. And I got the not-so-subtle message that genre was not going to be appreciated in that workshop.

In the collection there’s this great tension between haint and abomination. Florida seems to be both.

Exactly. The horror stories in Florida write themselves. What to me is just so—disappointing isn’t a big enough word, but I’ll use it right now. What’s so disappointing about what I see happening politically in Florida is that so much of it is about erasure. Let’s pretend this isn’t happening, i.e. Covid, and let’s pretend this didn’t happen in terms of racial history.

So that’s Florida as abomination. What about it is haunted?

My parents moved to Quincy, Florida, which was where my mother was from. In visiting them, I got a taste of my mother’s childhood. She would drive me around and say, “This is the courthouse. This is the hanging tree. This is this land. This is that land.” And every time I visited her, it just spoke to me as such a rich setting that I came up with this idea of a fictitious town called Gracetown. It was very much based on Quincy, and in some way, it’s based on Marianna, Florida, which is where the Dozier School for Boys [a reform school where Black boys were brutally beaten and killed] was.

In Horror Noire you say, “Black history is Black horror,” which is painfully insightful.

My interest in horror was sparked by my mother’s interest. My late mother, Patricia Stevens Due, and father, John Due, were civil rights activists. The kind of activists that when I was in college, I could look in the index of my history book and there they were. She was watching those old creature features movies. I was raised on The Mummy, The Fly, The Wolfman, The Mole People. You name it—if it had a “The” in the title, I got to love it like a child loves horror: because it’s slightly forbidden, because it might give you nightmares. It’s like a roller coaster. For years, I assumed that that was my mother’s relationship with horror, too. But about the time we were shooting Horror Noire, I started to realize that my mother’s attraction to horror had more to do with racial trauma than with feeling like it was a fun roller-coaster ride.

Did you get to discuss that with her?

I never got the chance to talk to her about this, unfortunately. She passed away in 2012. But for someone who had been tear-gassed at the age of 20 and wore dark glasses the entire time I knew her, even indoors, she has this very visible scar from the civil rights era and some other invisible trauma from the era. All kinds of fears of the clock turning back. Which has come to pass, so I’m not saying it was unfounded. But she had a lot of fear locked inside of her body. And I really believe that horror helps vent that fear. Like watching a vampire or watching a ghost story or zombies can be so healing because it looks the way fear feels without retraumatizing you, because you are not probably going to be attacked by a zombie, your grandchildren are not going to be attacked by a zombie, right?

Lisa Kennedy writes for the New York Times, Variety, the Denver Post, and other publications.