This is the third release from Run for It, the new horror imprint of Orbit Books, part of the larger Hachette Book Group, and it's the third that I've reviewed here at the Nameless Zine, after 'My Ex, the Antichrist' by Craig DiLouie and 'Moonflow' by Bitter Karella. That's a seriously different set of three horror novels, which highlights how broadly they see the genre. The former featured a pop punk band who may have featured the Antichrist himself in their line-up, very modern in its approach. The latter was one of my favourite books of last year, a bizarre and surreal queer trip into myco-horror. This is folk horror that's built around an HBCU.

If I have a complaint, it's that both debut novelist Beatrice Winifred Iker and her publisher see an abbreviation like that as unworthy of explanation, along with an associated one later in the book, PWI. They even throw HBCU onto the back cover. I caught its drift, but had to look up the meaning of the four letters, which is a Historically Black Colleges and University. PWI, on the other hand, is Predominantly White Institution. I appreciate the difference between the two but it would seem appropriate to actually explain them, rather than rely on readers who aren't familiar with them pausing to google them. I know PWI as 'Pro Wrestling Illustrated'. Am I a heathen?

That mild quibble aside, I liked this novel a lot, especially the fact that it seemed to lay everything on the line by the hundred-page mark, with three hundred still to come, yet still spring more than one surprise on me. I especially liked the lead character, Zora Robinson, who's an estranged sister and budding folk historian; a capable rootworker who can hide her Rottweiler from the university with a mojo bag to get round pet restrictions and a gay woman who's comfortable in her sexuality; and a driven activist who delivered a notable conference speech that keeps coming up.

Talking of that, this is the sort of book where library assistants are thrilled to meet deliverers of niche speeches like 'Deconstructin' the Centuries-Long Respectability Politics Plaguing the Black Church'. And it's the sort of book whose author is happy to dedicate a page to Zora pondering on the ancient door to the Rare Books Room at Bricksbury Mountain College. I get the latter, if not the former, but I appreciate the dedication of someone willing to write and deliver a speech like that and someone else who feels a real buzz at being allowed to attend on a social media pass. In fact, I appreciated a huge amount of the furniture of this book, even though I'm more candidate material for a PWI than an HBCU.

We're in Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee, where Zora's been accepted to Bricksbury, at which her elder sister Jasmine is doing her doctorate in Biblical Studies, as well as teaching on the side. Zora's into folklore so is taking Appalachian Studies. She's angry when Dr. Maurice Grant rejects her thesis proposal on 'The Spiritual History of Affrilachia', which I'd absolutely read, but he doesn't want her do something else; he wants her to narrow her scope, handing her a vintage diary by Esther Fisherman, a former librarian at Bricksbury a century ago, and suggesting a dive into the "beast in the woods" folktale.

This all happens in the present day, but Zora's chapters are interspersed with others that go back to the founding of Bricksbury by Amias and Hosanna Crawfoot in 1823. The town was Jonesboro at that point and they're as Christian as you might expect for rural Tennessee at the time, but they also sacrifice foxes in the name of God to protect the university to come with defensive magic. I'd call the eerie combination of Christian dogma and conjure magic as one of many highlights here. I see a lot of folk horror, but it tends to be set in the UK or Ireland, maybe on the continent. It's far less typical to see it unfold in a historically black section of Appalachia.

Iker throws a bunch of other characters at us, beyond the ones I've mentioned, and many of them interweave between different threads of story. For instance, Zora clearly likes a neighbour in the university housing, Khadijah Marquez, whose cat, Dr. Ncuti, is hidden through rootwork similarly to Zora's dog, Henry Louis. Mallory Holsten runs the Conjure Shoppe in town but visits campus for monthly Conjure Night. Her assistant, Immanuel used to teach with Khadijah and now both study at Bricksbury. These are all people Zora's happy to meet. She's less happy to find that Dr. Grant's teaching assistant is Ngozi, her elder sister's spouse. She'd hoped to avoid them on campus.

As I mentioned, by the hundred-page mark, everything seems to be set out for us. Amias Crawfoot built-in some sort of protection for the university he and his sister were founding. He considers it a demon sent by God and history makes it very clear that Bricksbury escaped the worst of the race hate that flooded over the south. The Klan do show up at one point, but they're gone quickly and this HBCU may well be the safest campus in the country, historically speaking. It doesn't take any real insight to connect his demon sent by God to Grant's beast in the woods folktale and we're let quickly in on the need to keep that protection active, which takes sacrifice.

Even now, typing out that paragraph feels like I'm hurling out spoilers, but I haven't touched on a single aspect from the last three quarters of the book and Run for It plastered more than into the back cover blurb. It doesn't seem like there's enough story left to warrant this sort of page count and, indeed, if I had chosen to spoil everything in my previous paragraph, it wouldn't actually be a lot longer than it is. However, Iker deepens this story as they grow it and I wasn't ever bored while they did so. I believe I figured a couple of things out before they rendered them crystal clear, but much of it was still hazy when they trawled out her revelations. And that's not because they came out of nowhere; it's because they wrote them well.

I'm impressed with Iker, especially as this counts as their debut novel. I like folk horror anyway but would love to read more of it that unfolds in a scholarly setting like this, where characters want to learn, even before they have to in order to protect themselves. It also gives us excellent access to culture, both fictional and real. I adored how Zora and Mallory bond over DeFord Bailey, the real polio-stricken harmonica wizard who was the first African American musician to play the Grand Ol' Opry, transcending racial divides by playing with white hillbilly bands. I knew nothing about Effie Waller Smith, James Weldon Johnson or Danez Smith, but they're all real too.

So, that's three hits out of three for Run for It. I'm eager to see what else they having coming up. I see another book coming from Craig DiLouie, as well as a few other books that look interesting by names I don't know. Horror is on a serious high right now and it's more diverse than ever, which is fantastic to experience. I look forward to whatever else they're happy to send over for review. ~~ Hal C F Astell