Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due, a winner of the American Book Award and an Essence and Los Angeles Times bestselling author, brings you her debut short fiction collection! The title novella, Ghost Summer, won a Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society (originally published in The Ancestors). This collection includes Patient Zero, The Lake, The Knowing, Herd Immunity, and many other stories.

Stories

Ghost Summer

Alisha 

Elizabeth Moore

This collection of short stories and one novella was extraordinary. I chose to read it for my Book Riot: Read Harder 2020 challenge prompt, “Read a horror story published by an indie press.” I never would have picked this up otherwise and I am so glad I did.

This book slingshots you between the haunting of the old south and the post-apocalyptic horrors of the near future, from the Deep South to the Northwest Pacific and back again, but you don’t feel any of the whiplash because you’re so entranced in each story that takes hold of you next. There are ghosts, demons, monsters, curses, zombies and pandemics, and then there are the horrors of the rational realm: cancer, loss of family, desperate loneliness, despair over what has become your life. The “Carriers” chapter was especially haunting; I’m not sure Due could ever know back in the early 2000s how terrifyingly familiar some of her stories would feel for readers in the COVID world of 2020.

I enjoyed every story, but standouts for me were:

Ghost Summer, which made me shiver and shake and check my windows every 5 minutes in the broad daylight. This should have been an Are You Afraid of the Dark episode, no question.

Patient Zero, which reminded me a lot of The Girl With All The Gifts. It is terrifying and very real-feeling, yet it will gently open your heart wide open and then break it with a cold steel hammer.

The Danger Word, which is the best zombie short story around, and has a much heart and heart-pounding as all however-many-there-are seasons of The Walking Dead combined.

The Knowing, which crept up on me, out of nowhere, and made me cry for an hour. I can’t tell if I cried because it was beautiful or because it broke me.

Every story is truly wonderful in its own right, and I found myself wishing over and over that they would make movies and shows out of each one because I would love to see they way each of these stories would come to life on the screen. I’d watch them forever and I plan to return to this book many times over. 

On a separate but important note, I’m very grateful to this book and it’s extremely talented author for reawakening for me the thrill and power of a good short story, and for making me realize how good a terrifying book can be. It’s been forever and ever since I’ve dived into this genre and style, and I hope to revisit both very often from now on.

Ghost Summer Stories

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