With «Something out there. A New Black Horror anthology” (Sellerio, translated by Luca Briasco), Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams bring to Italy a project that continues the political research of the director of “Get Out” and “Nope”, using the genre as a lens capable of revealing what society prefers to ignore.
«I see horror as a catharsis through entertainment – writes Peele – a way to process deep fears and wounds». From here was born an anthology that brings together nineteen African-American authors, from NK Jemisin to Tananarive Due, to explore horror as a form of political revelation.
Peele opens by evoking the “oubliettes”, medieval prisons as narrow as vertical coffins, from which only a glimpse of sky could be glimpsed. Places where prisoners felt the lives of others passing by, while they were deliberately forgotten. It is the metaphor that defines the volume: stories like dark rooms in which what society tends to remove comes back to demand attention. The debut text, «Eyes That Starre» by NK Jemisin, was born from a real episode from which the story of Carl Billings, a police officer who feels persecuted by car headlights, takes shape. A disturbing image that evokes racial tensions, George Floyd’s “I can’t breathe”, the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. “The black gaze is the perspective of people who are constantly surveilled, of people whose sight is literally deadly if they look at someone the wrong way. Many of us died because of this,” the author revealed in an interview.
The anthology awarded with two prestigious awards – Bram Stoker Award and British Fantasy Award – composes a bestiary of contemporary ghosts: modern zombies, houses haunted by African spirits and grieving daughters as in the valuable “The Dark House” by Nnedi Okorafor. One story after another, the supernatural is a cultural reminder: each text investigates racial trauma and its metamorphosis in the present. Sellerio proposes a modern work that rewrites the genre from a marginalized perspective: as Peele reminds us, to truly free oneself from darkness, one must have the necessary strength to know how to look at it.
