The Reformatory

"It’s fascinating to see this one scoop the World Fantasy Award; it’s being shelved most often as horror . It’s also an excellent piece of historical fiction . So it slightly defies categorisation, in the best way. It’s a gripping read. It’s 1950s Florida, and our protagonists – siblings – are black, their father on the run after trying to unionise and being falsely accused of rape, their mother dead. Young Robert is sent to the Reformatory, an institute for juvenile ‘offenders’ (he kicked a grown man to defend his sister). Here there are haints, i.e. ghosts; premonitions are the other major fantasy element. The supernatural here is definitely on the disturbing side. But the haints aren’t the worst horror of the book. The Reformatory is a heart-breakingly cruel place, in perfectly earthly ways – it’s based on Florida’s infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. At times the haints feel like they offer some release from the too-real world you are reading about, somewhere for your imagination to escape. It’s a huge achievement, a really compelling book, convincingly fantastical while also presenting a real slice of history."

"This eerie novel about a haunted boys’ prison in Jim Crow-era Florida was inspired by the troubled life and premature death of the author’s uncle, who died at the real-life Dozier School for Boys in 1937. “I was so struck by the sadness of this institution’s reign of terror that I knew I had to write about it—but not as nonfiction,” Due told Black Fiction Addiction . “I decided to fictionalize Robert Stephens and his experience to represent many nameless, faceless young people who suffered and lost their lives at the Dozier School. I made him 12 instead of 15 and changed the year to 1950, since I knew that era better from my mother’s stories. I also used ghosts to try to make the violence at the institution a bit more removed from my protagonist.” A creepy story of survival that is, quite literally, haunting—and has also won the Shirley Jackson Award and a LA Times Book Prize."

"It’s hard to dream up something more terrifying than real history, and Tananarive Due doesn’t try. Instead, she uses elements of the spiritual and supernatural to enhance a setting already dripping with horror – a reform school (based on a real place) where young boys are sent to repent for their youthful misdeeds. The book takes place in 1950s Florida, and the protagonist is Robbie, a young Black boy navigating racism and ghosts alike. But though the world he inhabits is often cruel and terrifying, Robbie’s story is also propelled by community, persistence, creativity and love."