My last year as a high school teacher, I taught a senior English elective called Fear, Haunting and the Supernatural. I’ve been out of the classroom for two years now, and the real world hasn’t gotten any easier to understand. As I created my curriculum for this course, I often dwelt on the same questions I asked my students when thinking about my novel. Why do we create what scares us? Is fear the best vehicle for social change? How can fantasy enhance reality, rather than distract?

My novel Junie is a supernatural coming-of-age story about the titular character, who faces a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, but it’s more of a story with a ghost than a ghost story. Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. 

What I’ve found so compelling in my years as a speculative reader, writer, and teacher is how other authors use fantastical elements to offer their own commentaries in unique ways. While Mary Shelley could have written a book about the dangers of science, telling a story of a scientist bringing a man-made corpse to life is far more resonant. While Octavia Butler could have written a modern Black character reflecting on their ancestry, it is far more powerful to see that character time travel and face the man who is both their enslaver and ancestor. In my novel’s case, the ghost serves to confront Junie with her grief, rage, and conflict in a more visual and visceral way. Fantasy allows authors to craft settings, characters, and plot points that foster conflicts that are impossible in pure realism. At its best, speculative fiction uses the unreal to put reality into clearer focus, allowing authors to create more potent social commentaries. 

The following seven works of speculative fiction are a few of my favorite examples of the genre’s limitless possibilities to examine power, race, and oppression: 

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell

 Our Share of Night follows Gaspard, a child in dictatorship-era Argentina whose mother has just died under mysterious circumstances and, unbeknownst to him, was part of a satanic, capitalist cult. To save his son from the cult and the darkness it worships, Juan, Gaspard’s father—a former cult member forced into leading its rituals as a child—does everything in his power. The novel is a fantastic allegory for wealth, fascism, and capitalism, focusing on how the wealthy worship power and abuse the poor and indigenous to further their ends. One of the most messed-up books you’ll ever read. 

Kindred by Octavia Butler 

From the outset, the book throws 1970s Black woman Dana into the world of antebellum Maryland, demanding she save a young boy. The boy’s identity as a plantation heir who will later assault his slave is revealed, explaining Dana’s heritage. This book showcases Butler’s mastery of speculative fiction, using fantastical or futuristic settings to explore human conflict in ways that would be impossible in reality. Unlike most time travel novels, Dana’s movement through centuries is a violent and traumatizing experience, one that forces her to confront the darkest realities of slavery and African American ancestry. It’s a modern classic for a reason. 

TW: Sexual assault

Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Part road trip, part intergenerational family story, Sing Unburied Sing follows mother-and-son Leonie and Jojo as they travel to pick up Jojo’s father from Parchman Prison in Mississippi. Like most great ghost stories, the haunting has little to do with the undead spirits. Instead of focusing on supernatural ghosts, the novel explores how the lasting effects of systemic racial and class violence haunt people’s lives. 

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

When Noemi goes to visit her newlywed cousin Catalina, she’s already very apprehensive about Catalina’s reclusive English in-laws. What starts off as a wellness check turns into a horrifying fever dream in one of the strangest haunted houses in literature. Like Haunting of Hill House meets The Substance, Moreno-Garcia crafts a lingering and powerful social commentary on colonization. Prepare to have your understanding of fungi revolutionized; you’ll never see mushrooms the same way again. 

TW: Sexual assault

All’s Well by Mona Awad 

Mona Awad is best known for weird-girl classic Bunny. In her most recent book, theater teacher Miranda lives with incurable, debilitating chronic pain that has ruined everything from her acting career to her marriage. She spends all her free time immobilized in agony or tortured by male doctors with little regard for female pain. Her only slight happiness lies in staging a college production of All’s Well that Ends Well, despite her students’ mutinous opposition. When she’s visited by three strange men who give her the ability to transfer her pain and thrive, Miranda enters a manic state of joy at her revenge and physical freedom. Based on Awad’s own experience living with chronic pain, this book is a searing and often-times funny critique of the social disregard for women’s pain. 

Boys of Alabama by Genevieve Hudson 

This queer coming-of-age tale set in the heart of evangelical Alabama focuses on Max, a German immigrant with the ability to resurrect the dead. Hudson uses a Perks of Being a Wallflower-esque narrative to slice into the dark underbelly of Southern culture, from the cult-like football obsession to the charismatic politician/pastor known only as The Judge. The novel uses all the elements of Southern Gothic to great effect to explore identity, religion, queerness, and masculinity, all building to a compelling commentary on power and violence in religious communities. 

Babel by RF Kuang 

This historical fantasy novel follows Robin, a Canton-born orphan adopted by a British professor and trained to work as a translator as the fictitious Babel, a school within Oxford in the 1830s. In Kuang’s alternate history, translation powers the Industrial Revolution and British colonialism through silver bars that channel the “lost-in-translation” elements of language into action. The novel, beginning as a coming-of-age story set in academia, evolves into a powerful commentary on white supremacy, colonization, and power, revealing how imperialism exploits immigrants and the colonized. Warning: you will cry.