Blurb:
| 13 SCARY STORIES. 13 AUTHORS OF COLOR. 13 TIMES WE SURVIVED THE FIRST KILL. The White Guy Dies First includes thirteen scary stories by all-star contributors and this time, the white guy dies first. Killer clowns, a hungry hedge maze, and rich kids who got bored. Friendly cannibals, impossible slashers, and the dead who don’t stay dead.... A museum curator who despises “diasporic inaccuracies.” A sweet girl and her diary of happy thoughts. An old house that just wants friends forever.... These stories are filled with ancient terrors and modern villains, but go ahead, go into the basement, step onto the old plantation, and open the magician’s mystery box because this time, the white guy dies first. |
This is a book that is going to make racists people mad, and
I’m here for it. Consider yourself forewarned: if you’re white, this book is
not written for you and you’re going to need a thick skin to read it. White
people are so used to having positive representation in media that a book where
white people make everything worse and always end up dead is going to rub the
more sensitive white folks the wrong way, even those who might consider
themselves allies. But for the rest of us? It’s awesome and a much-needed
subversion of the “Black
Guy Dies First” trope. Now, just because the white guy dies first in these
stories does not make the BIPOC immune from horrific deaths. Hedge and The
Protégé both have Black teens who meet violent ends. A Native person in Best
Served Cold is tortured. They’re just not the first to die and get to be
main characters.
Many (but not all) of the stories focus on the racism characters
face and how often bad things happen to BIPOC people because of the actions of
white people. Farz-joon from Break Through Our Skin by Naseem Jamnia is
a non-binary, Iranian high school student who desperately wants a Smithosian
internship. In order to secure one, they agree to volunteer at the University
of Chicago’s Oriental Institute
(thankfully, the problematic name was changed to the Institute for the Study of
Ancient Culture in 2023) working under a condescending, racist, and transphobic
old white professor named Dr. Hudson who thinks he knows more about Iran than
Farz does because he’s studied it, speaks Farsi, and actually visited Iran,
which Farz has not. He also objects to the Institute’s name change because the
original name has “history” and “meaning.” Farz tolerates his boorish behavior
so they can fulfill their dream of becoming an archeologist and challenge the
idea that gender can be determined from a skeleton alone, but of course Dr.
Hudson criticizes their “modern” ideas about gender stating “political correctness
has no place in ancient history”, despite historical evidence of gender
non-conforming people existing in ancient Iran and bioarchaeologist's more recent views on
sex and gender. Unsurprisingly, it turns out he only hired Farz to give the
exhibits a “layer of authenticity” and he’s willing to jeopardize Farz’s future
by withholding his recommendation.
Wasps by Mark Oshiro focuses on how gentrification
hurts immigrant communities, while Hedge by Kalynn Brown has a topiary garden
created by wealthy whites in the 1970s where anyone who enters winds up dead,
including the main character’s father. In Grave Grove by Alexis
Henderson, a Black teen named Rumi befriends a white Northerner named Kaitlin and she helps adjust
to life in the Southern US. The two even start a podcast together entitled Girls
and Ghosts. Their newest episode is about Kyle Adams, a racist who went
missing in the eighties after chasing a Black teen, William Jones, into an
abandoned plantation. Unfortunately, we quickly learn that Kaitlin is not a
good friend to Rumi. She ignores her at school in favor of hanging out with
white girls, makes Rumi do all the grunt work for their podcast, and is
actually pretty
racist for someone who probably considers themselves liberal. She excuses
Kyle’s racism because it happened in the past (the 1980s) and “everyone was
racist back then.” She thinks William is a “drug dealer” who belongs in prison
because he was caught with marijuana, despite smoking weed herself. She views
Kyle as the victim, not William. She doesn’t want to talk about the racist
history of the plantation or consider the slaves who died there, just the
missing white boy. She even mentions her sister’s best friend got
married at the plantation, a favorite location for Southern brides (gross).
Side note, but I loved that Kaitlin believed in the supernatural while Rumi was
the skeptic, since BIPOC are so often cast as superstitious and foolish
compared to logical white people. I’m a skeptic myself so it was nice to see a
character like me in both Grave Grove and Hell is Other Demons,
where the Black main character is an atheist.
Best Served Cold by H. E. Edgmon and The Protégé
by Lamar Giles both have the BIPOC main characters get into trouble
specifically because they choose to trust a white person. In the former, our
protagonist, EJ, makes the mistake of accepting a white man who befriended
their brother. EJ struggled with internalized racism throughout their childhood,
doing things like using cheap, unsafe contacts from the mall to change their
eye color from brown to green. Kai, their brother, tells EJ that those are
their ancestor’s eyes, and that their appearance connects them to their
ancestry and they should be proud of them. Kai works to reclaim a past that was
stolen by colonization (like learning traditional farming and hunting), and
teaches EJ about ancestral trauma. EJ realizes the reason they feel angry and
frustrated is because they are “playing a game whose rules have never been
designed for me to win.” Their mother claims to be white because she passes,
even though her grandfather was sent to a residential school in Oklahoma. She
denies her heritage. EJ and Kai’s parents grew up together on a reservation in
Florida, but moved to Chicago as adults. They told their children they’d left
the Rez to give them a better life. Kai brings his white friend (possibly
boyfriend) Isaac, who has intense green eyes, to a Pow Wow where the other
Natives give him side eye. Clearly, they see something Kai doesn’t (there are
other white people there but they don’t face the same level of scrutiny). One
of the community leaders talks about MMIWC
(Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children) which serves as
foreshadowing. It’s implied that the antagonist in the story is a certain evil
spirit from Algonquian mythology (one who’s associated with winter and cannibalism).
Edgmon is Seminole, not one of the Algonquian tribes, but he writes with
respect, never breaking the taboo of using the spirits name which is said to
summon it. This particular creature is also a perfect representation of
colonialism with its insatiable hunger and destructive nature. Kai and EJ do everything they can to fight
colonialism but still fall victim to the evil spirit.
The Protégé by Lamar Giles, like Best Served Cold,
is a particularly tragic story with the main character, Troy’s, life ruined by
his best friend, in this case an older, white gentleman named Jack Meridian.
Jack is a retired magician who’s been mentoring Troy in the art of card tricks
and illusions, and one of the young teen’s only friends. Troy so admires the
older man that he immediately agrees to do him a favor, accepting a package
while Jack runs errands downtown. Simple enough, right? While Troy’s older
brother Darius is having a party with his friends, Troy sees that the news is
reporting a mass killing at the mall where Jack was heading. He tries to
contact his magician mentor but the person who killed him answers the phone and
threatens Troy if he doesn’t give them the package he received. The killer is
revealed to be Danford Dread, a magician who “perverts” the art and performs
dark and gory magic that “plays to the worst in people.” And
now he’s after Troy and his brother. Even though the white guy in this story is
a “good guy” he still ruins a Black boy’s life by bringing him into his world
and putting him directly into danger.
In Hell is Other Demons by Karen Strong, the main
character is killed (she spends most of the story as a ghost) because her
crush’s white boyfriend starts meddling with the supernatural and summons a
demon. The other stories of dating a white boy don’t end with dead young women,
but they do highlight the perils of interracial dating, namely that white men
often fetishize
non-white women. I mean, just look how BIPOC
women have their own categories on porn sites (gross). Obviously not all mixed-race
relationships are problematic; my parents are a mixed-race couple, my sister
has an amazing Chilean fiancé (who is himself biracial), and I’m friends with
happily married couples in mixed relationships. Unfortunately, there are always
bad apples.
In both the Golden Dragon by Kendare Blake and Docile
Girls by Chloe Gong, Korean-American Sophie and Chinese-I-think-American-but-possibly-New-Zealander
Adelaid are dumped by their white boyfriends (and subsequently lose all the
white people they thought were their friends) who fetishized them but don’t
view them as committed relationship material. As Sophie’s sister puts it, they’re
an exotic bang to mark off their “international bang bingo card.” Even after
she gets dumped, Adelaid’s ex sees her as too weak and docile to be the killer
who’s been stalking the teens, an assumption that proves fatal for him. This is
unfortunately
common, as all the East Asian-American women I know I can attest to. When
they’re sexually harassed, it almost always has racist undertones. They’ve been
propositioned by white men looking for “submissive
waifus,” had “me so horny”
shouted at them, asked if they have sideways
vaginas, or “complimented” on their “exotic”
beauty. White men have long fetishized East Asian women, with examples
dating as far back as 1898 with the book Madame
Butterfly. A Columbia
University study from 2007 showed that in online dating, White men seemed
to have a strong preference for Asian women when it came to hookups, but when they
wanted a committed relationship, they preferred white women. Meanwhile, Black
women, especially
those with dark skin, are considered less desirable
than women of other races.
In All Eyes on Me by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé main
character Helen deals with a white boyfriend, Asher, who is constantly committing
microaggressions. He mocks her kinky hair, and implies she can’t be an actress
because she’s Black and not a “bombshell.”
Yet Helen still feels guilty about wanting to break up with Asher
because everyone else considers him the perfect, all-American boy. And as a
Black girl she’s supposed to be grateful that a white boy wants her, even
though being tied down to him and trapped in their small town forever sounds
like a nightmare. Fortunately for all three girls, they end their stories
without being tied down by their racist exes.
Not all the stories in the collection are focused on race and racism, however. The Road to Hell by Terry Benton-Walker has a very original set up, exploring an abusive relationship between a haunted house and a family living it with the house as the abuser. Everything’s Coming Up Roses by Tiffany D. Jackson is about a mentally unwell girl named Leesa who is obsessed with gardening and documents her daily life in her journal. Leesa is an unreliable narrator and the true horror is slowly revealed over the course of the story. Like most anthologies, the quality of the stories varies, but none that I would have rated below three out of five stars. Some were good, others, like Everything’s Coming Up Roses, Gray Grove, and Best Served Cold, were great. It’s also worth noting that many of the stories are VERY gory, which may be too much for younger teens who aren’t big horror fans. Of course, since most horror fans were reading Stephen King when they were eight, I don’t foresee this being an issue for anyone who decides to read this book.
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