Black Arts
Megan Giddings
Paperback/Audio
ISBN: 978-0063352797
Amistad, September 8, 2026, 240 pgs
An upwardly mobile couple continues trying to build a life together at the end of the world. A woman returns to the site of an alien encounter with new friends who haven’t been told the whole truth. Ghosts throw house parties and lure their fresh young neighbors into terrible situationships. A girl made of glass navigates a visit from her unintentionally dangerous, flesh-and-blood cousin.
These stories and more make up Black Arts, the first short story collection from Megan Giddings, who previously graced readers with the medical science fiction novel Lakewood and the feminist dystopia The Women Could Fly. Like both of those books, the stories in this collection dance just at the edge of the real world, pushing at the edges of daily life and current events just enough to be deeply unsettling. All of the stories are horror, but not all of them are overtly supernatural or gory. Think Twilight Zone, not Tales from the Crypt.
Several stories feature ghosts. Out of them all, “Double Exposure” hits the hardest. It’s set in a world where ghosts are part of the regular population, renting apartments, throwing house parties, and getting into romantic relationships like any other ordinary citizen. When two fully alive young women with high artistic hopes befriend their phantom neighbors, the resulting relationships lead to tragedy and uncomfortable revelations about what it might really take to “make it” in the arts. There’s a wistful, transitional quality to this story that perfectly complements a cast of characters closely occupying both sides of the line between the worlds of the living and the dead. While the plot twist that the story leads to is predictable, it’s also very meaningful, especially if you’ve ever seen an artist burn too bright without a stabilizing focus.
Other stories teem with longing and regret for stolen and missed opportunities, other lives and even other lifetimes. While some of the ghost stories intersect heavily with these themes (most notably “The Art of Possession”), other stories come at these feelings from sad, twisty angles that still manage to be more fascinating than depressing. In “Last Meals,” the impending end of the world is parsed through a series of vignettes titled according to final meals shared with friends and family, leading to a moment of well-earned hope in the midst of continued disaster. Like all of these stories, “Last Meals” is complex, intricate and exceedingly well-crafted. Every sentence has a meaning, and every detail builds on it. Grief, love, joy, and sorrow are balanced so well that a story about the world’s end becomes a story about the struggles of maintaining relationships amidst the performances of acceptability that daily life can require, which then circles back to the existential dread of a predicted meteor hitting the earth one day and obliterating life as we know it. Giddings is an excellent writer with a near-perfect sense of literary balance, and it works best in stories like these, where she embroiders uncomfortable reality into familiar speculative fabric. It reads effortlessly, but more than a few times I reached the end of a story, said to myself “Wait, how did she do that?” and immediately went back to the beginning to read again.
Identity is a factor in many of these stories, but in an effortless, inclusive, non-performative way. There are quite a few gender diverse and queer characters. All of the stories centralize Black American culture in a way that is balanced and focused, not didactic. In some of the weirder stories, like “Brittle” and “Are the Straights Okay?” this is refreshing. In a story about a Black girl being literally made of glass, the focus is on ways of mothering and overprotection. In “Are the Straights Okay?” a man cursed with the tendency to catch on fire does so because of his own folly as a man. The author gives clues on how stories like this came to be in the final inclusion in the collection, the speculative memoir essay “How to Be a Black Writer,” which initially seems to be a straightforward retelling of the author’s days as a graduate student but unfurls into something much deeper.
This collection is a thoughtfully filled treasure box of human experiences wrapped in weird, unsettling gift wrap. If you liked Marie N’Diaye’s novella The Witch or Samantha Mill’s short story collection Rabbit Test, you’ll probably like this as well.
