Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Dr. LaTanya McQueen, a novelist, essayist, and professor who currently teaches English and Creative Writing at NC State University.

Do you remember the day your childhood ended?

For some of us, innocence slips away like dandelion fluff, gossamer threads carried off on gentle breezes. But for others, the division between childhood and adulthood occurs like the sudden crack of lightning cleaving a tree in two.

In LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes, our main character Mira doesn’t realize she’s about to experience the latter. It’s a blazing summer day in Kipsen, North Carolina, and Mira is hanging out with her two best friends, Jesse and Celine. Everyone’s parents are at work, leaving the teenagers to find their own ways to while away the summer hours.

Then Jesse says, what about the Woodsman Plantation?

Celine, the only white member of the friend group, isn’t interested. But Mira—in secret, heart-aching love with Jesse—agrees to follow him. The old plantation is deep in the nearby woods, overgrown but always looming. As Mira follows Jesse into the woods, she tries to ignore her growing disquiet. Horrible, dreadful things happened at the plantation—including terrible violence perpetrated against her own not-too-distant ancestors. Would the plantation somehow sense her connection to its bloody past?

Mira waits outside as Jesse, a budding photographer, shoots images of the old mansion. And then, in a flash of blood and screams and racing feet, their lives are never the same again.

This is the inciting incident of LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes, a slim yet unforgettable novel that explores Mira’s reckoning with this traumatic moment—and her own truest self. Years later, Mira is summoned back to her hometown by an invitation to Celine’s wedding. Which will be held at…yes, your sudden sense of dread is correct: the old Woodsman Plantation, freshly remodeled into a luxury resort complete with historic reenactments.

When the Reckoning Comes puts a magnifying glass up to the South’s most buried, shameful secrets. While so many people attempt to erase plantations’ dark histories, McQueen illuminates the reality in stark and accurate detail.

But the story is woven deftly, placing these moments of gutting historical reality in a larger narrative fabric. When the Reckoning Comes is full of yearning, suspense, desire, and wedding drama, set in an immersive location. When I recall this book, I feel the sting of the sun on my arms, the cold waft of night air rising from plush grass, the sweat beading on tall glasses of iced tea as fan blades beat overhead.

I unwittingly reached out to Dr. McQueen at the absolute busiest time of the semester, but she was still kind enough to send me a wonderful interview via email. There are some very minor spoilers ahead, but none that would in any way lessen your enjoyment of the novel!

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Could you tell me a little bit about your novel, and your roots in North Carolina?

The pitch for the When the Reckoning Comes is that it’s a novel about a woman, Mira, who returns to her hometown to attend the wedding of her childhood best friend, Celine. The wedding is being held on a renovated plantation that provides guests with an antebellum-era experience, complete with reenactments. The plantation has also been rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of slaves seeking vengeance on the descendants of those who once enslaved them.

My family is from North Carolina and I live there now, in Raleigh, teaching in the MFA Program at NC State University.


What has your horror genre journey looked like? What kinds of stories get under your skin the most?

I consider the book to be within the Southern Gothic genre, so it’s been interesting to see it marketed and thought of as an explicitly horror novel, since it wasn’t how I conceived of it originally. In retrospect, I do see the comparisons, especially to Octavia Butler and to Tananarive Due, the latter whose work I’ve been familiar with in my past teaching of African American Literature and Studies courses. It makes sense that the book would be placed under historical or social horror.

A lot of what’s considered horror in the novel as it relates to the depictions of how slaves were treated, is historically-based. The scenes from the past are all rooted in truth. The scenes with the protagonist, Mira, going to the plantation are fiction, but are heightened satirical versions of what I saw and experienced when I visited plantations throughout the South as research for the novel.

Thinking back to my early childhood reading experiences though, I did read a lot of V.C. Andrews and Lois Duncan growing up, and I think their books fit in within the horror genre, although Duncan might be a bit more thriller.


I’ve also read a lot of Joyce Carol Oates over the years. She’s a very prolific writer, but there was a period in my life where I had gotten close to having read her entire oeuvre. Horror elements seem threaded in a lot of, if not most, of her works and they’ve had a profound effect on my writing.

In 2024, When the Reckoning Comes was released as a Harper Perennial Olive Edition alongside The Exorcist, Dracula, Tananarive Due’s The Between, and other celebrated horror novels. I believe your novel was also the most recently published!

Do you remember when you found it out your novel would be included? What did that moment feel like?

I appreciated that Harper Perennial chose When the Reckoning Comes for the Olive Edition because the original version was only a paperback release that came out during the Covid-era. I never got to do any in-person book events for it, and we just had that one print run—no hardcover then paperback release.

It was nice that the book got an additional release to help bring more readers to it, and I was happy to be included with Lovecraft Country author Matt Ruff, whose book I’ve taught in the past, and also Tananarive Due.

My favorite aspect of When the Reckoning Comes was definitely Mira's character arc. As the story unfolds, we get to see Mira question the respectability politics she was raised to embrace, and she discovers new modes of self-expression, power, and confidence. And as you said in a podcast interview, that's one of the key reckonings within the story.

Thank you for saying that about Mira. A lot of criticism I’ve faced with the novel is to some reading, they didn’t get a stronger sense of a reckoning—I guess part of what some were wanting was a bloodied comeuppance of the white wedding guests and plantation visitors.

I get that, but for me the book’s true reckoning was about this character having to come to terms with her own internalized biases and how that has shaped her life. The “reckoning” is a character realizing that falling for respectability politics ultimately, is never going to work in the fight against white supremacy.

I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t read the novel yet—but do you have a sense of how Mira's life changes after everything she experiences? What do you hope would be possible for her in this new chapter of her life, now that she has confronted past trauma, survived these terrible events, and undergone a life-changing transformation?

I imagine her as someone who is a little more outspoken and a little less concerned about catering to white expectations and working to free herself from the burden of that. I don’t know if she ends up with Jesse or if she keeps her teaching job. I imagine she is someone now working to find ways to be more involved directly with the Black community.

In terms of craft and storytelling, how did you approach the novel's supernatural elements? What did those supernatural elements allow you to do within the story that may not have otherwise been possible?

I wanted to walk a line with a lot of what happens in the present scenes between what could be supernatural and what could be chopped up to plausible events.

Alden Jones, who bought and renovated the plantation, could have had a heart attack, or he could have died by angry slave ghosts. The ghosts Mira sees could be ghosts, or they could be any of the antebellum-era reenactments we’re told that happen as part of the attraction of visiting the plantation.

Characters are constantly questioning what they saw, questioning what others have seen, and all of this is also shaped by rumor and myth surrounding the Woodsman Plantation.

We're living in a time when our government is rewriting and erasing history from the public record—and yet we're also in a time when the horror genre is thriving, subversive, and deeply political.

As a professor teaching in an MFA program, what kinds of conversations are you and your students having about the role of storytelling and fiction in culture? What do you hope for emerging writers, particularly Black authors who are publishing their fiction debuts or dreaming of doing so?

A lot of my students, a lot of which come from marginalized backgrounds, struggle remaining focused on the expectations of the program with the sheer onslaught of terrible news. Every day, it seems, we’re all becoming witness to a new tragedy. The horror of our daily experience feels constant and relentless.

It’s hard. I tell them all the time that it’s hard because it is, but you keep going and you write because you have something to say. You write because it matters. You write with the hope you’ll create something lasting, even if just one person reads it and are changed by it, that’s something lasting.

My father also likes to tell me when I’m feeling down about how “the time passes anyway,” and I try to remember that when I fall too much into despair to the point where it affects my work. Our lives on this earth are short, our time limited, so I’m just trying to do the best I can with however many days I have left: to do what fulfills me, to be with the people I love, and to help others with whatever means I have. I try to guide my students toward that path as well.


Is there anything else you'd like people to know about your work, or anything that's stayed with you from writing When the Reckoning Comes?

While I am working on another novel, it’s still very much in in-progress mode, but my essay collection, And It Begins Like This, written a few years before When the Reckoning Comes, explores similar territory as the novel. Some of the novel was very much inspired by situations that were written about in the essays. In some ways, I view them as a pairing, so if readers liked the novel they might like the other.

Next week, we’ll be joined by my friend Maya Rector, who you may know from The Weird Girl Edit newsletter (one of my all-time fav weekly reads!) or her fun and stylish writing vlogs over on TikTok.

Maya and I have been teasing a secret project for months now—and we’re finally ready to open up about what we’ve been working on! Next week’s newsletter will have allll the juicy details.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.