Jordan Pelee wants you to read about the fear you don’t see

It’s clear that visible genres—to whatever general public indie might have at any given time—change over time, but it’s also clear that the idea of ​​something unique is a little more elusive today than it was in 2000. Bryan started uploading his music to YouTube in 2017. While the song was playing, his friends recorded it with their phones. Until one of his songs went viral and he left the crowd to join another crowd: the crowd that virtual popularity had given a stronger focus, but was still surrounded by many other people and origin prejudice. Something similar to what once had literary value. Or didn’t something similar happen to Charles Beaumont, the prolific writer of some episodes of The Twilight Zone?

a great friendship

Beaumont was not a sailor but a soldier. When World War II broke out, he joined the American Army. He was born in 1929, in the year of Crack, and owes his nickname, born Charles Leroy Nutt, to an artist he worked with when he was very young. In the foreword to Maybe a Dream (El Paseo), a collection of the best unexpected stories recently published in Spain, Ray Bradbury describes how, in 1946, he was walking out of a bookstore when a 16-year-old boy approached him and started talking to him. from his comic book collection. They eventually became very good friends; They became the kind of friends before whom the world disappeared as they talked together about their own affairs (in their case, almost always other planets and strange creatures). The child was, of course, Charles Beaumont.

At the age of 34, with an extremely short life, four children and hundreds of thousands of jobs, he began to notice the symptoms of what in 1963 was considered a “strange brain disease”: Alzheimer’s -, Beaumont had the kind of fame that every pulp writer has – perhaps It was also aided by a large readership and status in which your name was synonymous with a certain kind of story, rather than your name or the name of any writer. He is the screenwriter of the instant cult series The Twilight Zone, a television classic of the 60s. The work in question has developed and remained in shadow at the same time, as its fame still overshadows it today.

As happened to science fiction writers at that time – in the middle of the last century – they were people chosen from the crowd, but joined another crowd, where the name was the least important thing. and the rest is history or stories. Some, like Bradbury, managed to survive until they emerged from mass anonymity, reaching a definitive turning point with one or two works, and from there with others.

white men

But let’s not forget that they were all great and almost all white men. That’s why what Jordan Peele just did—yes, the movie director, director of Nope and Get Out—has tremendous value and brings back a lot of no-name names in another way.

About Scream Outside – something like About Scream Outside – is the title of an anthology of horror stories chosen by the black priest of fantasy cinematography, a strangely wild, strange and deeply political terror, in his own words, black horror. They are all written by African-American authors and explore not only supernatural terror but also the social injustice that they call “plaguing our country.” The names include NK Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, Maurice Broaddus, Cadwell Turnbull, and a small group determined to escape the avalanche of contemporary references—some of which have already done so—and, fortunately, shine. The light bulb Peele is holding.