Book Review — "When the Reckoning Comes" by LaTanya McQueen
LaTanya McQueen and I have been mutuals on Twitter for quite some time. In fact, I can’t even recall when exactly we started following one another, or what motivated us to connect. In any case, Dr. McQueen has always been a lovely addition to my timeline. So when I was perusing NetGalley a while back, my scrolling thumb stopped dead in its tracks when I spotted her name. I suddenly had to know everything about When the Reckoning Comes—which, first of all, is a killer title. The description called the book a “haunting” novel about a “blood-soaked history.” Excellent. One of my favorite horror motifs is the ole someone’s-ancestors-did-something-heinous-and-now-their-descendants-are-fucked, like the folks in John Carpenter’s The Fog. As it happens, I occasionally got quasi-The Fog vibes from When the Reckoning Comes, although the heinous stuff coming home to roost in this story is much more monstrous.
The setting for the horrors, past and present, is the fictional Kipsen, North Carolina—a prejudiced locale that our protagonist fled more than a decade ago. In the years since Mira broke free, she has been living and working as an English teacher in Winston-Salem, with no intentions of ever returning to Kipsen. Until she receives a wedding invitation from her white childhood best friend, whom she hasn’t spoken to in ages. Celine so desperately wants Mira to see her wed a young Southern beau, whose family’s immense wealth was built on a foundation of carnage, that she offers to finance Mira’s entire trip. Not only would going require Mira to return to her hometown, but specifically to the Woodsman plantation—once the site of a gory slave revolt and also a place of trauma from Mira’s youth. Because of course Celine and her groom are getting hitched on revamped plantation grounds that now function as a tourist destination and party venue!
LaTanya McQueen
It is beyond me why anyone with an understanding of American history would choose to get married on land stained by immeasurable pain and death. That’s just it, though. An embarrassing amount of Americans are unaware of our nation’s ugly record of inhumanity. And that’s by design. For generations, schools and media have watered down the atrocities of slavery. Americans are aware that it happened, yes. But plenty of folks don’t know exactly what happened. A romanticized image of kindhearted belles and benevolent masters is ingrained in the psychological fabric of so many. This winsome picture of the Old South is the result of a systematic redrawing of the narrative. The abhorrent brutalities that millions of enslaved persons endured for centuries have been carefully effaced and reframed for the comfort of insecure white people. Growing up in conservative Ohio, I was a student of diluted teaching. In my 20s, I began re-educating myself, but unfortunately most white people are uninterestd in doing so.
Such unwillingness to reckon with the past is the basis for Dr. McQueen’s Southern gothic tale. When Mira arrives at the gussied up Woodsman plantation, she takes a tour of the property. She learns quickly that this false-facsimile takes measures to absolve attendees of any guilt. For instance, the slave quarters are quaintly decorated and are 100% climate controlled. To the ignorant, this validates the idea in their nescient minds that things weren’t that bad for the enslaved. (Additionally, foreign visitors with little to no knowledge of pre-Civil War America leave with a distorted impression of our past.) Mira also notices that although she is the only Black guest in attendance, she is not the only Black person on the premises. As part of the mise-en-scène, the Woodsman plantation has slavery re-enactors, in full garb, throughout the property at every stop—which guests can locate with a kitschy theme park-like map. The point is to pervert history, yes, but it expressly blots out the tormented spirits of those who died in bondage here on the Woodsman plantation.
Harper Perennial
Those restless souls become vengeful revenants as the story unfolds, sometimes blending in with the costumed players; it’s not always immediately clear whom we are “looking” at. Ambiguity is a big part of the storytelling, and that is not a dis. This is a novel set primarily in the present, but largely in the past too, and with Mira’s return to Kipsen comes a lot of unpacking, because something terribly unsettling occurred at the Woodman plantation in her teens. Reuniting with old acquaintances forces her to reopen several wounds, like when her friend Jesse nearly lost his life during a night of adolescent mischief gone wrong—a night wherein Mira may have witnessed something truly dreadful. So, she must simultaneously confront the ghosts of her own memory along with the actual ghosts of the land, who will not let a single detail from their accounts be erased. Thankfully, Dr. McQueen does not shy away from the grotesque. There’s a scene about boot-cobbling that left me trembling, a sickening moment that I’d say was straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre if it weren’t so historically verifiable.
When the Reckoning Comes plays out in ways that I didn’t foresee. I basically expected dumbass wedding-goers to get picked off one by one by supernatural forces as Mira put the pieces together. And, in a way, it’s almost that, but also not really. So, shame on me, because I should’ve known that Dr. McQueen was going to deliver something much more complex and nuanced. The story definitely has bloodshed, but there are layers of mystery and pathos carefully weaved in as well. She explores the delicate line separating memory and history—the methods our subconscious uses to shield us from a cruel past versus the methods racists use to systematically reconstruct harsh realities to uphold their supremacy. All the while, the novel never forgets that it’s a ghost story. LaTanya McQueen is a gifted writer unafraid of tackling serious and under-discussed subjects. Her When the Reckoning Comes is just the right amount of uncomfortable, striking a nice balance between haunting and unrelenting.
