About Newton

Once upon a time, the purpose of horror fiction was to take us to places we'd never been
and couldn't go otherwise. We visited haunted castles, polar wastelands, the minds of
monsters, the vast libraries of other dimensions. Horror took us to the mountains of
madness.

This seemed to change with the advent of what has been called "small-town" horror.
Instead of taking the reader to some fantastic realm, the horrors were invading Middle
America, the nuclear family, and all else that the reader presumably held dear. Some of
this small-town horror was very good; some of it -- in the words of alt.horror's Criswell --
blew goats. As a trend, I found it altogether less interesting than the
traveling-to-other-realms sort of horror. I loved being transported, but not to a cozy little
White, middle-class "real world" that resembled nothing I'd ever experienced.

At the 1992 World Fantasy Convention in Pine Mountain, Georgia, a young man
approached me and thrust a fat manuscript into my hands. He told me it was a horror
novel he had written and asked me to read it if I could find the time. Any published writer
gets more of these requests than we could possibly ever handle, even if we spent
twenty-four hours a day reading these unsolicited tomes. Usually we try to refuse as
politely as possible, remembering those days when we were the hopeful nobodies begging
the pros for some scrap of recognition.

So normally I would have found some kind way to tell this fellow no, I couldn't read his
book. But I'm uncomfortable, if not actually ashamed, to admit that I practiced an act of
reverse racism. The young man who'd given me the manuscript was Black, and to my
knowledge there had never been a Black horror writer per se. Many Black writers had
tackled supernatural and horrific themes, of course, but I couldn't think of one who had
actually set out to be a horror writer. I'd often wondered why, and so I was interested to
see what this man, Newton E. Streeter, had written.

The novel took me someplace I'd never been before. Not to a realm of fantasy, but to an
abandoned building in a housing project. New Orleans is full of such buildings; I drive past
them every day. But in real life, I could never go in. Streeter took me there.

Newton Streeter grew up in a middle-class, two-parent home in Chicago. He never lived in
the projects. But his brother did once, and Streeter tells a story about this that may well
have been a flashpoint for The Dare:

"Having never been to a housing project, I can say I was already extremely nervous when
my brother asked me to come and visit him at the infamous Cabrini-Green ... I was fourteen
years old and just dumb enough to take him up on his invite. I brought my friend Stefan
along for company/protection. Stefan was fifteen, six feet tall, and about 175 pounds. It
turned out he was more chickenshit than I was. He left me high and dry on the landing of
the seventh floor stairwell. It turned out that the two red glowing eyes we thought we saw
in the dark, smelly stairwell were the glowing 'cherries' of two joints being smoked by a
couple of Black Gangster Disciples gang members. Stefan was already on the bus as my two
newfound friends escorted me up to the thirteenth floor and my brother's apartment ...
After that experience, there was no doubt that a housing project is little more than a
modern-day haunted house."

As I say, the book took me places I'd never been. I also found the writing distinctive and
the characters unforgettable. I mentioned it to a number of publishing people, to no avail.
My husband and I became friends with Streeter and his wife, Zahanine. In the process, I
learned a lot about why there had never been a Black horror writer. Streeter had been told
by various editors that Black people don't read horror, that White horror readers don't
want to read about Black characters, and even that Black people don't buy books, period.
In other words, there had never been a Black horror writer because the publishing
industry has decided that there shouldn't be.

Since that time, a few Black authors have published work in the horror genre. The
best-known of these is probably Tananarive Due, but Newton Streeter seems poised to give
her a run for her money. He has survived racist editors, indifferent agents, and even the
joyful burden of fathering the world's most charismatic daughter (barely three, Camille
Streeter already has powerful people fighting each other to represent her in whatever field
she chooses to pursue). Streeter is a natural, and he's in it for the long haul. After reading
The Dare, I think you'll welcome him.

-- Poppy Z. Brite
New Orleans, LA, August 1999