How do you like your horror? Perhaps you’re a fan of creeping dread, or gory goings-on are more your speed? The White Guy Dies First: 13 Scary Stories of Fear and Power, editor Terry J. Benton-Walker’s anthology featuring authors of color, explores a variety of tropes for readers who enjoy disturbing, thought-provoking fare.
Despite their varied approaches, settings and baddies, all the ominously entertaining stories in The White Guy Dies First have two things in common: They center people of color and, per the book’s title, the white guy indeed dies first. Also evident throughout is an appreciation for horror. As Benton-Walker—author of the bestselling Blood Debts and Alex Wise series—notes, “The genre has always been a medium to deliver terror that’s most often intertwined with a deeper message, which can be far more horrifying than any superficial scare.”
Chloe Gong’s blood-spattered slasher, “Docile Girls,” features Adelaide Hu, head of the prom committee that includes her ex Jake Stewart and his snide friends. Jake had relegated her to “an exotic smiling accessory,” but on the fateful night before the big dance, Adelaide is anything but docile. And in Mark Oshiro’s suspenseful home invasion story, “Wasps,” Nina Ortiz defends her Abuela Carmen’s Brooklyn house from a gentrifier who wants to take their home—despite not knowing just how dark things can get in the Ortiz family’s basement.
There’s body horror (Naseem Jamnia’s “Break Through Our Skin”) and occult magic (Lamar Giles’ “The Protégé”), too. And an angry, hilariously profane haunted house narrates Benton-Walker’s own contribution, “The Road to Hell,” in which a Florida manse that spent centuries wanting love from occupants who “abandoned me, deeming me unlovable, unworthy . . . haunted” pulls out all the terrifying stops in an effort to make its current residents stay put.
Readers won’t want to put down The White Guy Dies First until they turn the last spooky page of this creative and creepy collection in which expectations are subverted and underrepresented groups claim their power from ghouls and demons both real and supernatural.