The first episode of the Black Horror Journal podcast launched in September 2025. It’s an introductory episode to how I got into horror as well as how Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” started to shape how I viewed the use of Black storytelling in horror. This is a transcript from the first episode, but you can also listen to it here or via any popular podcasting app.
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I’m Starr Rocque, and this is Black Horror Journal.
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This is a podcast where creativity, Black history, past, present, and future intersect with horror.
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My earliest memories of horror come from watching Freddy Krueger, Jason, and Chucky as a little girl. Yes, I said Freddy Krueger instead of Nightmare on Elm Street, and Jason instead of Friday the 13th, and Chucky instead of Child’s Play. Yes, I did. Anyway, as an elder millennial, I grew up when there weren’t many options on TV.
So I likely watched what the bigger people around me watched. And my mom is a fan of horror too. So it’s kind of like none of those movies scared me. So I guess she figured, whatevs, let her watch.
I also read a lot of horror. I dabbled in Marvel Comics horror titles like Dracula versus Spider-Man. I read R.O. Stine. I read a lot of R.O. Stine, mainly the Fear Streak books. And then of course, there were the Stephen King titles that I would sometimes borrow from my mother’s library.
My fascination with horror started with the thrill of being shook. But at some point in college, let’s say in the early aughts, I discovered Octavia Butler, also known as the Grand Dame of science fiction, mother of Afrofuturism, or my favorite, genius. She was a black woman who wrote sci-fi and horror, which was obviously unique to me. There weren’t that many then, and there still aren’t that many now. There’s more now.
But back then, it was really novel to find a Black woman who, in a lot of ways, I found her existence to be the answer to what somehow felt like something I shouldn’t be interested in, right? Like, I don’t know, sometimes reading comic books or like enjoying horror kind of felt like you weren’t supposed to like it.
Here she is explaining that very sentiment much better than I am in a 2000 interview that she recorded at Balticon 34.
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Well, in spite of the freedom that it gives you to examine almost any theme that you can think of, it’s confining in the sense that a lot of people think science fiction is Star Wars. And you have to be about 14 to enjoy it. And if you’re any older than 14, well, you should be reading literature, whatever that
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I got a hold of my sister’s copies of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and its follow-up, Parable of the Talents. So that was my introduction. From there, I went on to read more of her books. There was something different about them. They weren’t campy, not this lasher kind of horror. Her books were sobering and prescient because they tapped into real life themes and forced the reader to confront things
Society likes to tuck away and pretend don’t exist. And yes, all of her books aren’t technically horror. Even the parable series is classified as sci-fi, but there’s something scary there, right? Like the isms, racism, classism, sexism, et cetera. Octavia Butler used her brand of fiction as a way to critique and analyze what’s happening presently and what could happen in the future.
humans didn’t pay attention.
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The society that I portray in these two books is pretty much ⁓ broken. are living, the people who are surviving with any decency at all are living in walled communities and risking their lives whenever they go out. ⁓
There are a lot of reasons for this. ⁓ Drugs, of course, and deterioration of public education. ⁓
the ⁓ environmental situation, global warming is practically a character in Parable of the Sower. ⁓ Lots of other things that have simply, they’re problems now, they become disasters because they’re not attended to. And I hope, of course, that we will be smarter than(04:42)
Butler died in 2006, and Parable of the Sower came out in 1993. Yikes. The Parable series is technically classified as sci-fi, but sci-fi can overlap with horror. Plus, there are some scary themes in those books.
that we are experiencing right now in the United States that some of us saw coming. Hello. Let’s get into it though. Parable of the Sower is a dystopian novel set in 2024. Trippy, right? It’s about Lauren Olamina, a black teenage girl who suffers from a condition called hyper-empathy where she feels the emotions and pain of others. I mean, it can be very depilitating for her. There’s times when
If she witnesses someone getting stabbed, she feels it and it might cause her to pass out. Lauren lives with her father, who was a Baptist preacher, her stepmom and three half brothers in the remains of a gated community in a fictional town in California that some may liken to Altadena. Outside the gates of that community lie anarchy and straight lawlessness. It’s a world ravished by wealth, inequality,
corporate greed, crystal fascism, and climate change. Eventually, even the gates can’t protect Lauren and her family after her community is burned down. In a climate change incident, there’s more. Lauren’s version of America takes place in the year 2024, like I said, and during this time,
The US is at the mercy of President Andrew Steele Jarrett, whose slogan is, make America great again. Spooked yet? Lauren ends up getting separated from her family outside the gates amid the chaos. And as she goes on her travels and adventures and starts to meet new people, she starts a religion called Earthseed. Earthseed is based on the concept
that God is change. She does pick up quite a following, much to the ire of the Christian fundamentalists in charge.
All of these themes obviously sound scarily familiar, like I said. But Octavia Butler was no psychic, right? She was just a black woman who paid attention to the human condition and the state of the world.
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read the two parable books back in the 90s. They are books about, as I said, what happens because we don’t trouble to correct some of the problems that we’re brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems. I was aware of it back in the 80s. I was reading books about it.
A lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow.
that and the fact that I think I was paying a lot of attention to education because a lot of my friends were teachers and the politics of education was getting scarier it seemed to me. We were getting to that point where we were thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries. I remember
working on the novels, my hometown Pasadena had a bond issue that they passed to ⁓ aid libraries and I was so happy that it passed because so often these things don’t and they had ⁓ closed a lot of branch libraries and were able to reopen them.
So not everybody was going in the wrong direction, but a lot of us, a lot of the country still was. And what I wanted to write was a novel of someone who was coming up with solutions of a sort. main character’s solution is, well, grows from another religion that she comes up with. Religion is everywhere.
human societies without it, ⁓ whether they acknowledge it as religion or not. So I thought religion might be an answer as well as in some cases a problem. And in, for instance, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talons, it’s both. So I have people who are… ⁓
bringing America to a kind of fascism because their religion is the only one they’re willing to tolerate. On the other hand, I have people who are saying, here is another religion and here are some verses that can help us think in a different way and here is a destination that isn’t ⁓ something that we have to wait for after we die.
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The Parable series changed my perspective on horror and dystopian themes. Through those titles, and all of the Octavia Butler titles I’ve read thus far, I gained perspective on how horror can be a great storytelling tool for forcing people to confront fear. As an average storyteller myself, I realized that while I do love a good slasher fest or even a zombie smackdown,
It’s also cool to dig deeper into certain themes where appropriate. And that’s how I ended up here with Black Horror Journal. In my years as a journalist, it’s only within the past few years that I’ve dug deeper into my interest in Black life in horror by writing articles, interviewing masters such as Tana Nareef Dhu, Dr. Robin Armeen, and more. And last year,
I interviewed Roy Wood Jr. for another podcast. He’s a comedian, but this was just for another podcast I used to host. And before we began recording, we just started chatting. And somehow I found myself babbling to him about the history of zombies. And I mean, I got really nerdy, but bless his heart, because he actually listened. And even if I was probably talking him to death, it kind of inspired me to dig deeper into this interest of mine and document it, right?
I also took a history of black horror course hosted by writer and horror connoisseur, Tana Nareve Dew and her husband, Stephen Barnes, who is also a writer. They’ve written books, they’ve written screenplays between the two of them. They are a massive powerhouse. I can’t even begin to rattle off all the things they’ve been a part of, but they’re also fellow horror lovers. They are black. We are out there, black horror lovers. And again,
I love opportunities to expand how I think about things, especially when it comes to Black history and art, no matter the genre, no matter how good, no matter how bad, no matter how campy, and sometimes no matter how ugly. And that’s why we’re here with Black Horror Journal. Like I said, this is a podcast where creativity, Black history, past, present, and future intersect with horror.
I’m not gonna fronk. I’m nervous because this is new territory for me. But I find fear to be motivating. In my lifetime, I’ve discovered fear usually means a thing might be worth the pursuit. So I’ll be figuring this out as I go along and I hope listeners pick up what I’m putting down.
We are truly living in unprecedented times. When I was reading Parable of the Sower in the early 2000s, I perhaps naively had hoped that 20 years later we’d be living in a much more progressive version of the United States, but instead we’re in a regressive version of the United States. Then again, when I was in high school, I wrote a paper in AP History that posited that the Civil War never actually ended. It just went cold.
I’m no Octavia Butler, but my theory was that we’d end up here today if we didn’t take heed.
but I got to tell you, I was honestly thinking and hoping that the themes I was reading in her books could never happen, even though there was always that thought in the back of my mind. And now here we are.
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I have a character in the books ⁓ who is a… ⁓
someone who is taking the country fascist and who manages to get elected president and who oddly enough comes from Texas. And here is one of the things that my character is inspired to write about this sort of situation. She says, choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward.
is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar
is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
And there’s one other that I thought I should ⁓ read because I see it happening so much. I got the idea for it when I heard someone answer a political question with a political slogan. And he didn’t seem to realize that he was quoting somebody. He seemed to have thought that he had a creative thought there. And ⁓ I wrote this verse. Beware.
All too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To see and to hear even an obvious lie
again and again and again, may be to say it almost by reflex, then to defend it because we have said it, and at last to embrace it because we’ve defended it and because we cannot admit that we’ve embraced and defended an obvious lie. Thus, without thought,
Without intent, we make mere echoes of ourselves, and we say what we hear others say.
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And let me just add, the parable of the Sower series are banned books. That’s obviously not a coincidence. The powers that be don’t like when people confront their fears. And so, I hope you
confront all things Black, pop culture, and scary with me on each episode of Black Horror Journal. With that, I’ll leave you with a quote from Lauren Olamina via Octavia Butler’s pin game. All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.
Please read those books. I want to see what your interpretations are. I want to see how y’all feel about some of the scary things in those books that are pretty much really happening. Okay? Shoot, I need to revisit them too. Maybe we’ll tackle that.
later on as this podcast develops. But until then, see you next episode on Black Horror Journal.