This is a book that is going to make racists people mad, and I’m here for it. Consider yourself forewarned: if you’re white, this book is not written for you and you’re going to need a thick skin to read it. White people are so used to having positive representation in media that a book where white people make everything worse and always end up dead is going to rub the more sensitive white folks the wrong way, even those who might consider themselves allies. But for the rest of us? It’s awesome and a much-needed subversion of the “Black Guy Dies First” trope. Now, just because the white guy dies first in these stories does not make the BIPOC immune from horrific deaths. Hedge and The Protégé both have Black teens who meet violent ends. A Native person in Best Served Cold is tortured. They’re just not the first to die and get to be main characters.

Many (but not all) of the stories focus on the racism characters face and how often bad things happen to BIPOC people because of the actions of white people. Farz-joon from Break Through Our Skin by Naseem Jamnia is a non-binary, Iranian high school student who desperately wants a Smithosian internship. In order to secure one, they agree to volunteer at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute (thankfully, the problematic name was changed to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Culture in 2023) working under a condescending, racist, and transphobic old white professor named Dr. Hudson who thinks he knows more about Iran than Farz does because he’s studied it, speaks Farsi, and actually visited Iran, which Farz has not. He also objects to the Institute’s name change because the original name has “history” and “meaning.” Farz tolerates his boorish behavior so they can fulfill their dream of becoming an archeologist and challenge the idea that gender can be determined from a skeleton alone, but of course Dr. Hudson criticizes their “modern” ideas about gender stating “political correctness has no place in ancient history”, despite historical evidence of gender non-conforming people existing in ancient Iran and bioarchaeologist's more recent views on sex and gender. Unsurprisingly, it turns out he only hired Farz to give the exhibits a “layer of authenticity” and he’s willing to jeopardize Farz’s future by withholding his recommendation.

Wasps by Mark Oshiro focuses on how gentrification hurts immigrant communities, while Hedge by Kalynn Brown has a topiary garden created by wealthy whites in the 1970s where anyone who enters winds up dead, including the main character’s father. In Grave Grove by Alexis Henderson, a Black teen named Rumi befriends a white Northerner named Kaitlin and she helps adjust to life in the Southern US. The two even start a podcast together entitled Girls and Ghosts. Their newest episode is about Kyle Adams, a racist who went missing in the eighties after chasing a Black teen, William Jones, into an abandoned plantation. Unfortunately, we quickly learn that Kaitlin is not a good friend to Rumi. She ignores her at school in favor of hanging out with white girls, makes Rumi do all the grunt work for their podcast, and is actually pretty racist for someone who probably considers themselves liberal. She excuses Kyle’s racism because it happened in the past (the 1980s) and “everyone was racist back then.” She thinks William is a “drug dealer” who belongs in prison because he was caught with marijuana, despite smoking weed herself. She views Kyle as the victim, not William. She doesn’t want to talk about the racist history of the plantation or consider the slaves who died there, just the missing white boy. She even mentions her sister’s best friend got married at the plantation, a favorite location for Southern brides (gross). Side note, but I loved that Kaitlin believed in the supernatural while Rumi was the skeptic, since BIPOC are so often cast as superstitious and foolish compared to logical white people. I’m a skeptic myself so it was nice to see a character like me in both Grave Grove and Hell is Other Demons, where the Black main character is an atheist.

Best Served Cold by H. E. Edgmon and The Protégé by Lamar Giles both have the BIPOC main characters get into trouble specifically because they choose to trust a white person. In the former, our protagonist, EJ, makes the mistake of accepting a white man who befriended their brother. EJ struggled with internalized racism throughout their childhood, doing things like using cheap, unsafe contacts from the mall to change their eye color from brown to green. Kai, their brother, tells EJ that those are their ancestor’s eyes, and that their appearance connects them to their ancestry and they should be proud of them. Kai works to reclaim a past that was stolen by colonization (like learning traditional farming and hunting), and teaches EJ about ancestral trauma. EJ realizes the reason they feel angry and frustrated is because they are “playing a game whose rules have never been designed for me to win.” Their mother claims to be white because she passes, even though her grandfather was sent to a residential school in Oklahoma. She denies her heritage. EJ and Kai’s parents grew up together on a reservation in Florida, but moved to Chicago as adults. They told their children they’d left the Rez to give them a better life. Kai brings his white friend (possibly boyfriend) Isaac, who has intense green eyes, to a Pow Wow where the other Natives give him side eye. Clearly, they see something Kai doesn’t (there are other white people there but they don’t face the same level of scrutiny). One of the community leaders talks about MMIWC (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children) which serves as foreshadowing. It’s implied that the antagonist in the story is a certain evil spirit from Algonquian mythology (one who’s associated with winter and cannibalism). Edgmon is Seminole, not one of the Algonquian tribes, but he writes with respect, never breaking the taboo of using the spirits name which is said to summon it. This particular creature is also a perfect representation of colonialism with its insatiable hunger and destructive nature. Kai and EJ do everything they can to fight colonialism but still fall victim to the evil spirit.

The Protégé by Lamar Giles, like Best Served Cold, is a particularly tragic story with the main character, Troy’s, life ruined by his best friend, in this case an older, white gentleman named Jack Meridian. Jack is a retired magician who’s been mentoring Troy in the art of card tricks and illusions, and one of the young teen’s only friends. Troy so admires the older man that he immediately agrees to do him a favor, accepting a package while Jack runs errands downtown. Simple enough, right? While Troy’s older brother Darius is having a party with his friends, Troy sees that the news is reporting a mass killing at the mall where Jack was heading. He tries to contact his magician mentor but the person who killed him answers the phone and threatens Troy if he doesn’t give them the package he received. The killer is revealed to be Danford Dread, a magician who “perverts” the art and performs dark and gory magic that “plays to the worst in people.” And now he’s after Troy and his brother. Even though the white guy in this story is a “good guy” he still ruins a Black boy’s life by bringing him into his world and putting him directly into danger.

In Hell is Other Demons by Karen Strong, the main character is killed (she spends most of the story as a ghost) because her crush’s white boyfriend starts meddling with the supernatural and summons a demon. The other stories of dating a white boy don’t end with dead young women, but they do highlight the perils of interracial dating, namely that white men often fetishize non-white women. I mean, just look how BIPOC women have their own categories on porn sites (gross). Obviously not all mixed-race relationships are problematic; my parents are a mixed-race couple, my sister has an amazing Chilean fiancé (who is himself biracial), and I’m friends with happily married couples in mixed relationships. Unfortunately, there are always bad apples.

In both the Golden Dragon by Kendare Blake and Docile Girls by Chloe Gong, Korean-American Sophie and Chinese-I-think-American-but-possibly-New-Zealander Adelaid are dumped by their white boyfriends (and subsequently lose all the white people they thought were their friends) who fetishized them but don’t view them as committed relationship material. As Sophie’s sister puts it, they’re an exotic bang to mark off their “international bang bingo card.” Even after she gets dumped, Adelaid’s ex sees her as too weak and docile to be the killer who’s been stalking the teens, an assumption that proves fatal for him. This is unfortunately common, as all the East Asian-American women I know I can attest to. When they’re sexually harassed, it almost always has racist undertones. They’ve been propositioned by white men looking for “submissive waifus,” had “me so horny” shouted at them, asked if they have sideways vaginas, or “complimented” on their “exotic” beauty. White men have long fetishized East Asian women, with examples dating as far back as 1898 with the book Madame Butterfly. A Columbia University study from 2007 showed that in online dating, White men seemed to have a strong preference for Asian women when it came to hookups, but when they wanted a committed relationship, they preferred white women. Meanwhile, Black women, especially those with dark skin, are considered less desirable than women of other races.

In All Eyes on Me by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé main character Helen deals with a white boyfriend, Asher, who is constantly committing microaggressions. He mocks her kinky hair, and implies she can’t be an actress because she’s Black and not a “bombshell.” Yet Helen still feels guilty about wanting to break up with Asher because everyone else considers him the perfect, all-American boy. And as a Black girl she’s supposed to be grateful that a white boy wants her, even though being tied down to him and trapped in their small town forever sounds like a nightmare. Fortunately for all three girls, they end their stories without being tied down by their racist exes.

Not all the stories in the collection are focused on race and racism, however. The Road to Hell by Terry Benton-Walker has a very original set up, exploring an abusive relationship between a haunted house and a family living it with the house as the abuser. Everything’s Coming Up Roses by Tiffany D. Jackson is about a mentally unwell girl named Leesa who is obsessed with gardening and documents her daily life in her journal. Leesa is an unreliable narrator and the true horror is slowly revealed over the course of the story. Like most anthologies, the quality of the stories varies, but none that I would have rated below three out of five stars. Some were good, others, like Everything’s Coming Up Roses, Gray Grove, and Best Served Cold, were great. It’s also worth noting that many of the stories are VERY gory, which may be too much for younger teens who aren’t big horror fans. Of course, since most horror fans were reading Stephen King when they were eight, I don’t foresee this being an issue for anyone who decides to read this book.

3.5⭐️

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with an e-arc of this book!

All eyes on me - 3⭐️
Potential to have the scare factor, which was building up in the middle, but the ending sort of killed it off

Hedges - 4⭐️
Anything with nature involved in horror is sure to be creepy and twisted, and this was exactly that.

The Golden Dragon - 3⭐️
Paybacks a bitch and they deserved it. Think this would make an interesting novel.

Best Served Cold - 4⭐️
Chilling (pun intended). Loved this one.

The Protégée - 3⭐️
Wasn’t the biggest fan of this one, but it involving magic is quite fun.

Docile Girls - 5⭐️
A group locked in a high school and one by one the mysteriously die? Sign me up. Also reminded me of TVD.

Gray Grove - 4⭐️
Loved the setting and atmosphere of this one.

Everything’s Coming up Roses - 4.5⭐️
Roses are red, bodies can be buried. Enjoyed the concept of this one a lot.

Heaven - 3.5⭐️
Very intriguing plot, but I think it needed more background to give the full effect

Break Through Our Skin - 2.75⭐️
Loved the concept and the theme of identity, but
I didn’t gel with the writing style unfortunately

Wasps - 3⭐️
Great concept and exploration of gentrification, but I wanted more wasps.

Hell Is Other Demons - 3⭐️
Main character ends up getting a job in the afterlife, I wanna know more about that!

The Road To Hell - 3⭐️
LOVED the POV, but I felt some moments could’ve been expanded on to add more impact

I loved both listening to and reading this anthology! The narrators are absolutely amazing and it doesn’t feel boring and they are all selected based on protagonist and story arcs and are reflective of the narrative voices of the various authors.

A collection of horror stories written by a collection of great authors.

Honestly felt like each book story could have been its own book. This isn’t my genre, so this collection was a great way to dip my toes in. I felt like it was a great amount of intensity for a newbie like me.

Super creepy collection. I loved all of them! This is a great read for spooky season and I recommend reading this if you are in a book slump! Or wanting something short. I read all at once but you could break it up!

So good! Each story was an absolute 5/5. They were placed so well in the book and each was so well written.

WOW!! Five stars⭐️
I knew some of the authors, but discovered a lot more. I will definitely look into their works!

I love how it was short stories, but still a good 15 minutes read. The characters were developed, as was the plot. AND the white men die first!

Absolutely LOVED it

Anthologies are always so hard to review and rate because they’re all short stories. So lately I’ve been rating each individual story and then taking the average. For the most part it turns out to be accurate enough for me. As for reviewing, I just tell you a bit about those that I liked and those that I didn’t. That way you get an accurate look at the whole book.

This one starts off with a bang! And no I don’t mean the first story, I mean the message board that brings the anthology together. I’ve told y’all time and time again that I’m a sucker for books with text messages or social media, so this was no different. Add on to the fact that we see every genre of horror depicted in this, I was too excited! I was ready for this to wow me. And some of the stories definitely did! (Fair warning, they do get more gruesome and more gorey as the anthology goes on!)

The stories I liked were so damn good I had to sit with them for a minute. Like the one by Tiffany D. Jackson. (Of course I loved that one lol) I was a bit confused on where it was going, but when I got to the end, I was staring at the wall. In true TDJ fashion I was shook. I also loved the one by H.E. Edgmon. Yo, I stayed up a little longer to read the next story after that because that one kinda freaked me out. I am not scared of a lot of horror, but the subject of that one always freaks me out lol And of course I loved the one by Chloe Gong. I’ve never read anything by her, but this was my favorite sub-genre of horror and I LOVED it. It is gorey tho so tread carefully. But I mean, when isn’t a book/movie in one of those? And the one by Karen Strong and T.J. Benton-Walker were also good af. And I don’t usually like those sub-genres. I also really liked Alexis Henderson’s. I’ve never read anything by her before, so this was my wake-up call to do so! But my favorite of ALL of them? Definitely Kendare Blake’s. I called it and everything, but it was so good!

But as usual, there were also some I wasn’t a fan of. The one by Abida Jaigirdar was just weird. I wanted so much more from that one. I thought maybe it was just me because I’m not a huge fan of that sub-genre, but someone else who read it said they didn’t care for it either. The one by Lamar Giles and Mark Oshiro and Naseem Jamnia were all good, but not necessarily memorable. And in an anthology with all these big names, you gotta be more than just good. Because the others didn’t come to play! Kalynn Bayron and Faridah’s wasn’t bad, but I just didn’t feel like they were scary.

This was an interesting book and I really loved the way they pulled everything together. Definitely hoping there’s another one in the future because this one was fun. Some of them were weird, but some of them were really good! I hope y’all pick this up!

This was such a great short story collection with such strong authors! There was so much originality and a lot of horror. The one common element was that the white guy died first, but the stories are so different from each other. I think my favorites were the one with the mass killer at prom and the kid who casually summoned a demon and paid for it. So much fun. Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this.

These short stories are just as they are described. Short scary stories where the white guy dies first.

I truly enjoyed this one. I’m a horror/thriller junkie and it delivered. I enjoyed the many different writing styles and differences in stories. It was like I received several books in one.

Thank you Netgalley and all of the authors for this arc.

I loved this book and all of the authors different ways to talk about horror, preserve horror, and allow their own experiences to create horror!

Best Served Cold was my favorite story. I love creepy stories about humans doing nonhuman things!

Great book of scary stories for all seasons- you don't have to wait til October to read this.
We go from killer clown girls to revenge on rapist, to skin-walkers, to Home Depot killer, to mermaid monsters, to sapphic demon hunters, to a Haunted House looking for it's forever family.
This collection had it all. I thoroughly enjoyed the creativity from all the authors.
And despite the title, it didn't come across as white male bashing.
They should do one for white women who always fall down in scary movies-lol :)
Shout out to Lamar Giles, Kalynn Bayron, Tiffany D Jackson, and Chloe Gong who contributed stories.

I think this was a really cool anthology. I liked that all the stories kind of tied together, and I really enjoyed the way each story turned classic horror stereotypes on their heads. It was a little too gory for my personal taste, but it is literally horror so that's more a me thing than a book thing. I think people who love horror will adore this book. I'm just a bit squeamish lol.

Horror movie buffs will often play the guessing game of who’s going to survive until the end of the movie, and often it’s not the person who looks or identifies like themselves. In this collection of stories, that’s flipped on its head. Because, across the wide variety of these spooky tales, “the white guy dies first.”

In this volume, thirteen authors explore the dimensions of fear, terror, and horror, along with the concept of identity (from the concept of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality) and how that often places people into the category of “other,” with a feeling of isolation and a lack of safety that causes a kind of existential terror in and of itself. The authors don’t hold back on the horror, scary imagery, disturbing subject matter, and gore while bucking the trend of choosing marginalized people to victimize first in horror stories. This volume is for older teens horror buffs, who love a good scare and aren’t traumatized by stories with visceral imagery and a pervasive sense of dread that will keep them on the edge of their seat. If there’s a horror movie category out there, there’s a story in this collection to scratch that itch. It’s definitely worth reading.

4.5 stars

The White Guy Dies First is an anthology of horror stories. It was generally well-written and I tried to enjoy the stories but I have never gotten the point of horror and this book was unable to change my mind. Lovers of horror would enjoy this though. Thank you, Netgalley and Tor Publishing Group for giving me the ARC. All opinions expressed are mine.

There aren’t enough words for how much I love this. From the prologue I was hooked immediately. I enjoyed the curation approach, with each story fitting into a different subgenre of horror. There are a number of these I would love to see the authors flesh out into full novels in the future. I greatly enjoyed Tiffany D Jackson and Alexis Henderson! Benton-Walker’s sentient house had such a great and unique POV. There’s something for every horror lover here.

Thanks to NetGalley & Tor Publishing for giving me an ARC of this book.

First, there were a lot of great authors in this anthology. Second, there wasn’t a single story I didn’t like, but there were some I liked more than others.

I’m really enjoying short horror story anthologies. I feel like it really gives a nice sample of an author and their writing and there are authors from this that I haven’t read prior, but will definitely be looking into now.

I lvoed all the different stories found in this book. They were all so unique that I just wanted to read more. Thanks to the publisher and netgallery for the e-arc.

This unfortunately made me realize that the horror genre probably isn’t for me. I found these stories too intense and disturbing - I’m more of a thriller/slasher kind of person. I did like how there was a thread tying all of the stories together and thought it was an interesting and clever element. I did love Tiffany D. Jackson’s story, although there were still some details that weren’t totally clear for me.