black women writers | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Balzer + Bray, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062570604

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

Editor’s note: Due to its topic and content, Dread Nation contains racial slurs and outdated language. I’m using “Negro” in this review as it is the term used throughout the book.

In this alternate history, the Civil War ended after the dead rose at Gettysburg, forcing the Union and the Confederacy into a truce while they fought off cannibalistic “shamblers.” A law passed shortly after required all Negro and Native children, starting at age 12, to be trained to fight the shamblers in single-sex combat schools, for the protection of white Americans (Ireland writes in an author’s note that she got the idea for the schools after reading about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school intended to erase Native American culture and language and assimilate the children). Just as before the war, there are opposing movements regarding the treatment of Negroes: the Egalitarians, who believe they should be treated equally, and the Survivalists, who believe they are naturally inferior to white people.

Sixteen-year-old Jane McKeene, the biracial, dark-skinned daughter of a white woman married to an absent Kentucky plantation owner, has been training at an exclusive combat school that trains girls as Attendants, bodyguard companions for wealthy white women and girls who are trained not just in combat but in social skills and etiquette. Intelligent and talented in combat, Jane is rebellious when it comes to conforming to society’s demands and has more interest in helping others survive than in good manners, good looks, and appropriate conduct. Her frenemy, Kate, is not only talented in combat but attractive, well-dressed, well-mannered, and light-skinned enough to pass for white– enough to earn Jane’s enmity– and stubborn enough to eventually earn her respect. Jane’s insistent ex, Jackson, comes to her in secret to ask for help in discovering what happened to his younger sister, Lily, who lives with the Spencers, a prosperous white farming family of Egalitarians, passing for white. The family has disappeared, and he’s afraid they’ve been taken by shamblers. Jane, Kate, and Jackson sneak out to the family’s farm to discover that the family has disappeared, and that the mayor, a Survivalist, is covering it up.

In the meantime, Jane and Kate save the lives of the attendees of a lecture about a vaccine to inoculate people from becoming shamblers when bitten, including the mayor’s wife, and are invited to attend a dinner party at his house. They use the opportunity to sneak Jackson in so he can search for evidence about the mayor’s involvement with the disappearance of his sister and the Spencer family. but are caught and sent to a remote Survivalist utopian communty, Summerland, where white people live in relative luxury, protected from shamblers by cruelly treated and poorly armed Negroes. Jane is able to convince the authority figures of Summerland that Kate is actually white, saving her from the deadly labor of protecting Summerland from shamblers, and giving her a set of opportunities and problems that come along with attempting to pass as an attractive white girl in a community built on unabashed white supremacy.

I suppose what technically qualifies Dread Nation as a horror novel are the “shamblers,” who, while we aren’t certain by the end of the book, are probably carriers of an infectious plague that turns them into mindless, uncoordinated, cannibals with an endless urge to feed. But the zombies merely illuminate the true horrors that take place in the book, those grounded in arrogance and vicious white supremacy. The sheriff and the preacher are truly cruel men who use every opportunity to punish the Negro characters and establish their superiority, but even the overseers are casually brutal, and the white townspeople are willfully blind. Even before the girls are sent to Summerland, it turns out that characters who are supposed to care for them are absolutely horrible under their genteel surfaces. Every time Jane attempts to save lives by stepping in between another person and a shambler, she is punished for overstepping her place. Ireland demonstrates that even sympathetic white characters are complicit in the preservation of what they know is an unfair and cruel system. Mr. Gideon, a white scientist and engineer who wanted to provide electricity to frontier communities using natural resources, is an ally in many ways, but is trapped in Summerland, forced to use shamblers’ “manpower” to run the town’s generator, which preserves the image that all is going as it should and perpetuates the racist system the town is built on. Jane and Kate are both aware of how they can use negative stereotypes to manipulate white characters, and Kate is very conscious of how she can use her “whiteness” to her advantage, as well as how vulnerable she is.

In this #OwnVoices novel, Ireland portrays shifting vulnerabilities and loyalties as marginalized individuals attempt to navigate the racist system they are forced to function within are evident here in a way they might not have been if a different person had written this book. The Lenape character Daniel Redfern is somewhat of a mystery. One might think he and Jane would be natural allies, but while he saves her life early in the book, he is also responsible for her getting caught and sent to Summerland. Jane’s relationship with her mother, told in flashbacks and in bits and pieces, ends up putting a surprising light on what you think her story actually is. Jane’s relationships with both her mother and Kate contribute to a nuanced portrait of the damage, as well as the advantage, of colorism and “passing.” The other Negroes Jane works with in Summerland are more than a mass of victims– Ireland gives those that Jane interacts with names and personalities, and their agendas and fears sometimes set them against each other. The way the difficulty of being female intersects with the difficulty of surviving as a Negro is amply illustrated, not just through one set of eyes but through the experiences and stories Jane shares with many of the other characters. In addition to race and gender, while it isn’t an emphasis of the story, Jane expresses interest in both women and men, and Kate is pretty solid that she has no interest in romance or a relationship with either sex. As this is the first book in a series, it will be interesting to see how (or if) Ireland develops that further.

Dread Nation is a great read as a YA horror novel, and if that’s all you want from it, you can certainly read it that way. But it’s also a really intelligent, well-plotted book with great characters that has the ability to appeal to a widespread audience (including people who do not traditionally read either YA literature or horror) due to its nuanced exploration of race and white supremacy, character development, world building, approach to the past, relevance to the present, and its just generally fantastic writing. I have sold so many people on trying this book who would never in a million years have picked up a straight zombie novel. It’s not short, so I don’t know that reluctant readers will jump on it, but for the YA reader who likes independent-minded female protagonists, alternate histories, doesn’t mind a little gore, and can handle the racial slurs, this is an outstanding choice that more than deserves its place on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award. Highly, highly recommended.

Contains: Gore, violence, murder, torture, slavery, racial slurs, references to sexual violence.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Editor’s note: Dread Nation is on the final ballot of the 2018 Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

The cast of Wayward Sisters

Considering that Supernatural is a show that’s basically drenched in white toxic masculinity, it actually has some really awesome, kick-butt female characters, and because the fans demanded it, it looks like they’re getting their own spinoff show, Wayward Sisters . The recent backdoor pilot, though, apparently brought along its share of tired tropes centering men, especially the ever popular one of using a woman’s death, mutilation, or violation as a plot device and motivation for a male character to do his (usually violent and heroic) thing, according to The Mary Sue . This trope actually is common enough that it has a name: “Women in Refrigerators”. Before I even knew what it was called, I LOATHED this trope, which is the basis for pretty much everything that happens in The Crow. In this case, the women who were “fridged” also got to embody another trope: that of the black woman willing to carry on to support the talents of a white main character. On a show that’s supposed to celebrate women, and even had some diversity in its casting, a woman of color was killed off to advance the plot, for the Winchester brothers. In addition to representation in casting, I’m thinking some diversity in screenwriters is in order.

This trope is so tired and so vomit-inducing that someone has finally created an award to be given to a thriller that manages to get through its plot to the end without a women getting beaten, stalked, killed, raped, or sexually exploited, called the Staunch Prize. I can’t think of too many candidates that will qualify. Even my favorite tough-woman detective, V.I. Warshawski (yes, I’m old), gets beaten and stalked. You go after the bad guys, you fight injustice, and chances are there’s going to be some kind of violence or threat in your future. These days, all you have to do is tweet something someone doesn’t like to have death threats shower down on you. So I don’t know how many entrants the sponsor of the prize will actually find, but it says a lot that she is so damn tired of reading about violence against women used as a plot device that she would actually shell out hard, cold, cash to read a suspenseful book that doesn’t have it. We are not plot devices, and those of you writing horror who don’t already know this should know that leaning on women in refrigerators to drive your plot is lazy and disrespectful.

As you are thinking about and reading about women in horror this month (or writing about women in your own horror fiction) consider this: there are many, many, women writers and women writers of color who are writing horror fiction and poetry, from Linda Addison to Nnedi Okorafor, and including many who are unknown. I challenge you to seek them out this month and see what women, and especially women of color, are creating to scare the hell out of us.