13 Black Speculative Fiction Novels to Grow Your TBR List
by Kelsee Thomas
Shop this article: https://bookshop.org/lists/suspense-readin-magazine *affiliate linkSpeculative fiction is defined as a type of fiction closely associated with science fiction, fantasy, thriller, and horror genres. It’s an amazing umbrella term if you’re into reading fiction that stretches or examines reality! Reading speculative fiction, especially during uncertain times like these, can radicalize you, educate you about others’ experiences, but more importantly, it can be a way to better understand our world.
For a long time, Black people haven’t been as popularized in the genre as our contemporaries. Especially in the horror space, we’ve dealt with plenty of stereotypes that have led to us being openly left out of the community nearly since its creation. However, over the last decade that’s largely changed! No longer do we only have the notable work of Octavia E. Butler to rely on within the genre. Authors such as Tananarive Due, Brandon Massey, Nalo Hopkinson, Linda Addison, Joseph Nazel, and Jewelle Gomez carried the genre for years before the Black Horror Renaissance that was born from Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” in 2017. Now, more and more writers are releasing every year, expanding the genre and creating more worlds within Black speculative fiction.
Here are my favorites as well as a few on my current TBR to get you started on the constantly expanding genre!
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
It’s only fitting for us to start with the speculative queen herself, Octavia E. Butler. Set in 2024, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of LA. Behind the walls of their defended neighborhood, they try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger all while dealing with her hyperempathy condition. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
While unfortunately, the novel has been eerily correct for the future we’re currently living in in many ways, it’s also a reminder that Butler spent her career doing the research to notice the trends we’ve been moving in for decades. And more importantly, she did that research so we could imagine better futures and make the change we need!
All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
S.A. Cosby is an author that is known to show us how horrific a thriller novel can be, and examines America in a way that is unforgettable. In All The Sinners Bleed, Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.
Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.
As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.
Reading this fast-paced novel was both chilling in how religion and rooted hatred can make a person so evil, but even more so that it seemed all too familiar.
The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due
In this collection of short stories, Black horror expert, Tananarive Due, includes offerings of horror, science fiction, and suspense—all genres she wields masterfully. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic to the reaches of the far future, Due’s stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart and hope.
In some of these stories, the monster is racism itself; others address the monster within, each set against the supernatural or surreal. All are written with Due’s trademark attention to detail and deeply drawn characters who battle their demons both within, and in the outside world. In a recent interview I had with Due for Night Terror Magazine, she mentioned that “Black horror is horror that is either by Black creators or about Black protagonists. Period.” In this collection of extremely diverse stories and legends, she proves that’s as correct as can be.
Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
Rivers Solomon is known for their work building worlds and looking closer at our society. In Sorrowland, they take a look at Black American cults, government testing, and queerness at odds with a society that is constantly trying to figure out how to describe itself.
Our main character, Vern, is seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised. As a solution, one night she flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. Finding the truth will mean uncovering not only the secrets of the compound she fled, but also the violent history in the America that produced it.
Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer.
As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity in defiance of these so-called “games,” but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo, and the obstacles they lie in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.
Moving from the Links in the field, to the protestors, to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah blows us away as we take a futuristic look at the prison industrial complex in his most popular novel to date.
Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology, reading this novel made me realize the power of a well-written short story as well as how diverse the genre of Black horror can look like.
Ring Shout by P Djélí Clark
In 1915, The “Birth of a Nation” cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.
Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with a blade, bullets, and a bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan's demons straight to Hell. But something awful's brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up. Clark takes our history’s real-life horrors and puts them in perspective in this terrifying sci-fi novella.
The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings
Jo Thomas has heard every conceivable theory about her mother's disappearance. That she was kidnapped. Murdered. That she took on a new identity to start a new family. That she was a witch. This is the most worrying charge because in a world where witches are real, peculiar behavior raises suspicions and a woman–especially a Black woman–can find herself on trial for witchcraft.
But fourteen years have passed since her mother's disappearance, and now Jo is finally ready to let go of the past. Yet her future is in doubt. The State mandates that all women marry by the age of 30 to a man–or enroll in a registry that allows them to be monitored, effectively forfeiting their autonomy.
At 28, Jo is ambivalent about marriage and, more importantly, wonders if she can have a serious relationship with a man. With her ability to control her life on the line, she feels as if she has never understood her mother more. When she's offered the opportunity to honor one last request from her mother's will, Jo leaves her regular life to feel connected to her one last time.
In this powerful novel, Megan Giddings explores the limits women face–and the powers they have to transgress and transcend them in a way that feels approachable and relatable. To say the least, this story was so powerful that I cried while reading it.
Jackal by Erin E. Adams
Erin E. Adams examines small towns, rationalized racism, and the evil that can simmer in us all in this eerie novel. Our main character, Liz Rocher, is reluctantly coming home. As a Black woman, Liz doesn’t exactly have fond memories of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white town. But her best friend is getting married, so she braces herself for a weekend of awkward and passive-aggressive reunions. Liz has grown, though; she can handle whatever awaits her. But on the day of the wedding, somewhere between dancing and dessert, the bride’s daughter, Caroline, goes missing—and the only thing left behind is a piece of white fabric covered in blood.
As a frantic search begins, with the police combing the trees for Caroline, Liz is the only one who notices a pattern: a summer night. A missing girl. A party in the woods. She’s seen this before. Keisha Woodson, the only other Black girl in school, walked into the woods with a mysterious man and was later found with her chest cavity ripped open and her heart missing. Liz shudders at the thought that it could have been her, and now, with Caroline missing, it can’t be a coincidence. As Liz starts to dig through the town’s history, she uncovers a horrifying secret about the place she once called home. Children have been going missing in these woods for years. All of them are Black. All of them are girls.
With the evil in the forest creeping closer, Liz knows what she must do: find Caroline, or be entirely consumed by the darkness.
The Devil In Silver by Victor LaValle
New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, very old one. Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion–the other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down.
Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die?
The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrilling suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons.
Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase
Nelah seems to have it all: wealth, fame, a husband, and a child on the way. But in a body her husband controls via microchip, and the tailspin of a loveless marriage, her hopes and dreams come to a devastating halt. A drug-fueled night of celebration ends in a hit-and-run. To dodge a sentencing in a society that favors men, Nelah and her side-piece, Janith Koshal, finish the victim off and bury the body.
But the secret claws its way into Nelah's life from the grave. As her victim's vengeful ghost begins exacting a bloody revenge on everyone Nelah holds dear, she'll have to unravel her society's terrible secrets to stop those in power, and become a monster unlike any other to quench the ghost's violent thirst. Tlotlo Tsamaase examines bodily autonomy both in choice and by haunting in this sci-fi novel that takes place in a deadly Botswana from the future.
Devils Kill Devils by Johnny Compton
When all hell breaks loose, you need a devil on your side. Sarita has been watched over by a guardian angel her entire life. She calls him Angelo, and keeps him a secret. But secrets can’t stay buried forever. When Angelo murders someone she loves, Sarita begins to see what's really been lurking in the shadows surrounding her. And she will have to embrace the evil within if she hopes to make it out alive.
Johnny Compton, critically acclaimed author of The Spite House and master of dread, takes you on a terrifying race of one woman against the hordes of hell in his newest face-paced release.
The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson
When Springville residents are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation. Maddy did it. Tiffany D. Jackson does an amazing job of taking the Stephen King best selling novel, Carrie, and not simply remaking it, but reshaping it for an entire community that could relate to her reclaiming her power. The Weight of Blood not only talks about a lonely high school girl overwhelmed by her new found powers, but what happens when that girl is in a town that’s been needing to learn a lesson for some time now.
An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she's dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.
After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springville High's racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to host the school's first integrated prom as a show of unity. The popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it's possible to have a normal life.
But some of her classmates aren't done with her just yet. And what they don't know is that Maddy still has another secret. One that will cost them all their lives.