“I view horror as catharsis through entertainment,” Jordan Peele writes in “Out There Screaming,” the best-selling anthology of new Black horror he edited with John Joseph Adams. “It’s a way to work through your deepest pain and fear — but for Black people that isn’t possible, and for many decades wasn’t possible, without the stories being told in the first place.”
Nineteen writers contributed to the story collection, including N.K. Jemisin, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Tochi Onyebuchi and Tananarive Due. Initially Jemisin declined to participate, although she was pleased to be approached. “I like writing stories, but I’m very slow to write them and I don’t do well with commissions,” Jemisin said in a phone interview. “I don’t have any interest in writing to order, basically. I said, if something inspires me, sure, I’m on it, but otherwise don’t count on anything.”
Jemisin had a change of heart on a vacation in the Outer Banks: “Next door to us was a family of cops, apparently, who hung a thin blue line flag and partied all weekend and made a great deal of noise, knowing full well nobody was going to call the cops on them.”
She went on, “Nothing overt happened. We were fine. But we were on this trip with some teenagers and we told them, ‘Do not go out by yourselves because this doesn’t feel like a safe place to be a bunch of young Black folks.’”
Instead of going to the beach, Jemisin started writing “Reckless Eyeballing,” the story that now opens “Out There Screaming.” It’s about Carl Billings, a Black highway patrol officer with a habit of “roughing up” people he pulls over — a broken arm here, a baton to the teeth there. His white supervisor is on to him, and then a video of one of his traffic stops goes viral. But worst of all is Carl’s unsettling vision of oncoming headlights as eyeballs, blinking and veined, watching. He can’t get away from them.
“I channeled my discomfort into that story,” Jemisin said. “I wanted to explore the totality of this character’s breakdown.” Did it bring a sense of catharsis? Absolutely. And Jemisin was pleased to learn that other stories in “Out There Screaming” contain an eye theme, which also appears in Peele’s work as a filmmaker. “Eyes are so much a part of the Black experience,” Jemisin said. “The Black gaze is the perspective of people who are constantly surveilled, for people whose own eyesight is literally deadly if you look at somebody wrong. A lot of us have died for that.”
Elisabeth Egan is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “A Window Opens.”
