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There used to be peo
Author: Kennedy ColePage Count: UnknownPublication Date: Expected publication 2026-11-03 APL Staring at a blank canvas for three hours while the landlord hammers uselessly on the pipes next door tends to curdle one's patience. Yet here we are, pretending that prose written off a publisher's press release won't follow the exact same tired trajectory we have all watched crash and burn a thousand times. Kennedy Cole's upcoming There Used to Be People Here drops us squarely into 1970s Mississippi with a setup that screams prestige television pitch meeting—because heaven forbid a book just exist without wearing its genre mashups like a cheap neon sign. The Burden of the Badge and the Extraterrestrial Samuel Barkley is supposed to be the archetype of the strained survivor—the lone Black detective keeping his head down while the town watches him with those predictable, fake-smiling daggers. But wait. Let me back up for a second because I am already sick of pretending this dynamic is revolutionary. Is it really a subversion of the trope if the synopsis reads like an algorithmic Frankenstein stitched together from Jordan Peele's discard pile and a late-night cable rerun of The X-Files? S. A. Cosby gets dropped into the blurb like a talisman to ward off critical thought. We get it. Gritty rural noir meets genre weirdness. But crime fiction writers need to stop treating systemic racism as a mere atmospheric backdrop for a sci-fi monster twist. If you are going to use the weight of Jim Crow-era Mississippi—even obliquely through the lens of a local gay bar murder and a missing person—you do not get to pivot halfway through the manuscript into an alien invasion movie without earning every single drop of that thematic displacement. Existing as Other Until the Mother Ship Arrives The synopsis literally tells us the book explores race, queerness, and existing as other in a society that demonizes everything different. Bold strategy, making the cosmic horror literally indistinguishable from the actual horrors of the American South. Except—and here is where my earlier skepticism fractures into sheer exhaustion—maybe that literalization is precisely where the art dies. We trade the messy, breathing complexity of historical prejudice for a tentacled metaphor. Oh look, the townspeople are monsters, and ALSO there are literal monsters. Groundbreaking. Truly, we are asking so little of our speculative fiction right now. Give me a detective who doesn't have to share his page time with a clumsy plane crash UFO cover-up just to keep the reader awake. Or don't. Keep churning out these high-concept genre hybrids until every bookstore shelf looks like a Netflix pitch deck. I have turpentine drying on my skin and a half-finished canvas mocking me from the corner. Ouch. Dammit. I just stepped on a rogue building block left on the studio floor and I need a moment to recover my soul.