Overview

Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children's publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early twenty-first century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW's The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC's Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world.

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Reviews

"The Dark Fantastic will entirely change the way you read science fiction, fantasy, [and] horror, and I can absolutely assure you it will be for the better."" -- ""BookRiot"" ""A creative blend of autoethnography, literary analysis, and counter-storytelling, this volume is intriguing, accessible, and raises important questions that will likely generate additional research on this topic... A must read, especially for current and future educators."" -- ""Choice magazine"" ""One of the most radiant and thought-provoking descriptions of the potentials of fantastic literature."" -- ""Los Angeles Review of Books"" ""Thomas synthesizes theory from several disciplines to build her model of 'the dark fantastic'...Valuable for introducing readers to a range of concepts, this is an important work of criticism on an underexamined topic."" -- ""School Library Journal"""

Author Information

Janina Edwards, an Earphone Award-winning narrator, is a graduate of the acting program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an associate professor in the literacy, culture, and international educational civision at the University of Pennsylvania's graduate school of education. A former Detroit Public Schools teacher and National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is an expert on diversity in children's literature, youth media, and fan studies.

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