Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

In the Black Fantastic assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora that embraces ideas of the mythic and the speculative. Neither Afrofuturism nor Magic Realism, but inhabiting its own universe, In the Black Fantastic brings to life a cultural movement that conjures otherworldly visions out of the everyday Black experience and beyond looking at how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender, identity and the body in the 21st century. Transcending time, space and genre to span art, design, fashion architecture, film, literature and popular culture from African myth to future fantasies and beyond, this vital, timely and compelling publication is an expressive exploration of Black popular culture at its most wildly imaginative, artistically ambitious and politically urgent.

Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change. But as Richard Iton shows, despite the changes politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making of critical social spaces.

Youngsters are taken on an unforgettable glow-in-the-dark journey into the world of Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four with more than 60 reusable full-color stickers. Consumable.

ED GORMAN Bestselling Author of Shadow Games “Gorman’s writing is strong, fast and sleek as a bullet. He’s one of the best.”—Dean Koontz Seventeen stories. Seventeen slices of terror. Seventeen trips into the shadows. Whether it takes place in small ­town America, a lonely highway at night, the near future, or the Old West, the real setting of each tale is the realm of nightmare, the place where imagination and fear reign. "A master storyteller."—Dallas Morning News No one knows this eerie realm more intimately than Ed Gorman, award-winning author and master of dark sus­pense. Now, for the first time, his greatest tales of horror and the unknown are collected in one volume, a com­pendium of the fantastic and the terrifying, the chilling and the grotesque. Brace yourself as you get ready to experience ... THE DARK FANTASTIC With a Special Introduction by Bentley Little "One of the most original thriller writers around."—Kirkus "Gorman is a class act. He's up there with Dean Koontz and Thomas Harris."—Crime Time (UK) "Gorman knows exactly how to keep the reader on the edge of his seat."—Science Fiction Chronicle