The Reformatory: A Novel
by Tananarive Due
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel
🏆 Winner of the 2023 Shirley Jackson Award
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.
Recommendations from our site
“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.” Read more...
