Black Star Line is a genre-defying story collection in the vein of Jordan Peele and Octavia Butler that fuses speculative fiction and satire to explore Black life at the edge of collapse and possibility.

Spanning virtual worlds, haunted cities, and destabilized realities, the stories of this collection ask: what does freedom look like when it is presumed rather than fought for?

In “Drapetomania,” a mysterious epidemic causes Black people to run uncontrollably until their bodies give out, transforming a racist 19th-century pseudoscientific diagnosis into a chilling meditation on escape, exhaustion, and collective grief; in “Black Boys Only Die Twice,” a queer Black boy comes of age amid wandering ghosts, heavenly apartment complexes, and scissor-wielding aunties as he searches for his missing grandmother, whose fate is mysteriously bound to his own; in “Return Doors,” a couple’s unraveling coincides with the appearance of portals visible only to Black people. Elsewhere, “The Armillary Sphere” follows a boy who undergoes a procedure that allows him to glimpse the future.

At once electrifying and deeply humane, Black Star Line channels both blistering rage and profound tenderness, mapping the fragile, ecstatic, and often perilous possibilities that emerge when we dare to imagine beyond the constraints of the present.