OBSIDIAN • 239 SPECULATIVE SANKOFARRATION Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction Kinitra D. Brooks, Alexis McGee & Stephanie Schoellman In a powerfully short blog post celebrating Black women in horror, poet Linda Addison traces the origins of the very irst appearance of horror published by a Black woman. 1 Addison encounters what she considers the origin of Black women’s horror in the folktales found in Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of stories painstak- ingly recorded—in early twentieth-century Southern Black dialect—by then-budding anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston: “Besides themes of religion, family and other social concepts I also found two sections named: ‘Devil Tales’ and ‘Witch and Hant Tales’ (Hant means ‘haunt’ or ‘ghost’)” 2 (Addison). 3 Hurston’s work highlights Black interest in horror as a long-established reality in its communal literature—the rich oral folk culture and tales passed down through familial generations. In Cultural Hauntings (1998), Kathleen Brogan notes that ghosts or the “belief in ancestor spirits” have a long history in African diasporic lore and that these ghosts have a “communal nature,” exploring “a people’s historical consciousness” (2–5). Hurston’s records demonstrate that horror discourse is an established tradition in the Black community; yet there remains a dearth of critical recognition and literary scholar- ship. Bonnie Barthold connects Black folklore and literature by insisting that today’s “teller of tales [is] no less than the contemporary novel- ist” (3). Here, we focus on contemporary horror writers—particularly Black women—and build upon the foundation of criticism previously explored in the scholarship of Harry Benshoff, Kinitra D. Brooks, and, most extensively, Robin R. Means-Coleman. Their work highlight- ing Blackness and gender in horror media brings us to an important