The Reformatory: A Novel

by Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due’s 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.