Read This: The Spirit Room
The Spirit Room, Nicole Givens Kurtz’s, new collection, uses the supernatural to examine the deeply-ingrained racism and discrimination faced by people of color in America’s southern states. The short, sharp stories tap into the Southern Gothic tradition of family secrets, decadence, madness, and otherness. She then weaves in multiple otherworldly beings to make the dark themes even darker.
Kurtz sets her stories in the South’s urban centers rather than its small towns and faded plantations. Several of the stories seem to begin and end in medias res, creating a rough-edged, unsettling uncertainty about the characters and what will happen to them. Kurtz returns time and again to the stress of living with the threat posed by the police, the dehumanizing pressure to conform to imposed, arbitrary standards, and the disregard of traditional ways and beliefs. These dangers are just as haunting as the unearthly ones, and as relevant.
Gothic, indeed.
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“Speechless” describes the struggle to be heard, and opens the way for the thirteen stories that follow.
“Sweet Tooth” introduces a predator who hides and hunts in plain sight among the impoverished inhabitants of an inner city.
“Dogwood Stories” finds its power in syncretic faith and folk magic when a young girl falls victim to a drive-by shooting at a spring festival.
“The Guardian” presents a human tragedy as a consequence of a lack of faith.
“Turn of the Leaf” shows the failed promise of urban housing projects and the slow death of dreams inside them.
“As Dark the Night” is the bleak vampirism of depression, and how impossible it can be to break free without help.
“The Tell-Tale Tattoo” unmasks the racism and violence endemic in American policing in a Poe-inflected narrative. Brief and brutal.
“Shepherds of the Storm” explores police violence from the other side, as a couple seeking to escape a protest-turned-riot find a supernatural community that is not afraid to fight back. My favorite, here.
“Lipstick Smile” exposes the monster of conformity behind the conventional beauty industry.
“Sirens’ Song” is a vignette of a woman succumbing to depression despite her friend’s attempts to pull her back.
“Sunshine” traps a woman in a psychiatric ward with her demons–but she owns the power to fight them off even if she cannot actually escape.
“The Neighborhood HOA” again takes on soul-crushing conformity, this time with zombies.
“The Game” slyly shows that families, and the people who compose them, are complicated.
“Dark August Rain” blends acts of creation and destruction as an author learns to let go of something dear that will hurt her if given a chance.
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In The Spirit Room, Kurtz makes the history of American racial injustices a constant presence in her characters’ experiences. Sometimes it is a whisper in the background, and sometimes it is the entire story. Kurtz reframes it through the lens of horror, and makes us consider it anew–because horror is not just the monsters we imagine. It is the monsters we allow to exist.