Tananarive Due: On the Novel That Took a Decade To Write

Tananarive Due is an award-winning writer, educator, and producer, who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is the author of The Wishing Pool, Blood Colony, The Living Blood, and 10 other books. She is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror.” She and her husband/collaborator, Steven Barnes, wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of Jordan Peele’s “The Twilight Zone” on Paramount Plus.

A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. For more, visit her website, or find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Tananarive Due

Photo by Melissa Herbert

In this post, Tananarive discusses the emotional toll of writing her new horror novel, The Reformatory, her advice for other writers, and more!

Name: Tananarive Due
Literary agent: Donald Maass Literary Agency
Book title: The Reformatory
Publisher: Saga Press
Release date: October 31, 2023
Genre/category: Horror
Previous titles: 16 previous books, including The Wishing Pool, Blood Colony, The Living Blood, The Good House, Joplin’s Ghost, and Devil’s Wake.
Elevator pitch: The Reformatory is a historical horror novel set in 1950: a 12-year-old boy must grapple with oppressive conditions and ghosts inside a haunted reformatory while his 17-year-old sister plots his escape.

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What prompted you to write this book?

In 2013, I learned that my great-uncle Robert Stephens died at the notorious Dozier Schools for Boys in Marianna, Florida, in 1937. I wanted to explore the tragedy of this institution through the lens of horror fiction, using ghosts so I would not have to write too much about the suffering and abuse of children. I also wanted to paint a picture of the 1950s Jim Crow South so that readers could better understand what obstacles our forebears grappled with in the criminal justice system to show how it still impacts Black and brown people disproportionately today. Although the novel is highly fictionalized regarding the Reformatory itself, I have references to true-life characters like civil rights martyr Harry T. Moore and tragedies from Florida’s past. I also just wanted to give Robert a different story through his friendship with a ghost.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

Idea to publication has been a decade! I spent seven years researching the book on and off (while I was establishing myself as a screenwriter) because it was such difficult emotional terrain to read the books by survivors of the Dozier School. There were many times I didn’t believe I could bring myself to finish it. My two breakthroughs were the time I treated myself to a long weekend at a rental house that felt like a cabin in the woods: I read through everything I had written so far and mapped the book through to the end. Then, in 2020, when I was literally afraid I might die before finishing this novel because of COVID, I set up a writing chart with daily quotas that helped me track my progress in real time … and I finally finished it!

I always knew the ending I wanted, which isn’t always true when I first start writing a book, but in this case the ending was the entire point. I also got a great idea from my agent, Donald Maass, about one of the ghosts (but I won’t say what because it’s a spoiler!). But aside from that ghost insight, this novel is very much what I hoped it would be with the ending I wanted … with a small addition at the suggestion of my editor, Joe Monti, which takes the novel a bit further into the future than I originally intended. But I think it’s a good, healing addition.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

My 88-year-old father, “Freedom Lawyer” John Due, who was a civil rights attorney in the 1960s, made road trips with me for meetings and research in Marianna during the years I worked on The Reformatory. We talked to survivors and the first Black mayor of Marianna, Elmore Bryant. We visited the ruins of the old Dozier School. Because my mother, Patricia Stephens Due (Robert Stephens’ true-life niece) passed away in 2012, our research project into that hidden corner of her family history enabled us to both grieve and bond after her death.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Because The Reformatory is a horror novel, of course, I hope to scare readers first and foremost. But while the ghosts and magic in The Reformatory are fiction—and even the Dozier School is fictionalized in this novel—the horrors of much of the Florida history are real. My hope is that readers will be curious about the true-life lynchings and racial terror in the history of Florida, and be less complacent about accepting the status quo in our (still) highly biased criminal justice system.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

NEVER GIVE UP. Even a seasoned writer like me can feel discouraged, but it’s important to realize that emotions are not Truth, they’re just emotions. It’s fine to be afraid or to feel overwhelmed, but keep writing. And for learning writers, I particularly suggest writing short stories as both a learning tool in beginning/middle/end and as a way of establishing IP (intellectual property) sooner than it takes to sell a novel.

For example, I published a short story excerpted from this novel called “The Reformatory” in The Boston Review in 2018 – long before I finished the novel and was able to publish it.