THE DARK FANTASTIC, race and the imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games

225pp., paperback, New York, 2019

Winner of the 2022 Children's Literature Association Book Award, the 2020 World Fantasy Awards and the 2020 British Fantasy Awards, Nonfiction.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas on race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. She looks at four black girl protagonists: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.

"One of the most radiant and thought-provoking descriptions of the potentials of fantastic literature." LA Review of Books

"A compelling work of criticism, autoethnography, and counter-storytelling. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas reads within and across novels, film, television, fanfiction, the writers who create them, and online communities in order to explore role of race in the collective literary imagination. Thomas powerfully introduces the concept of the imagination gap and articulates its implications for the culture as a whole, recognizing the power and necessity of new stories capable of remaking the world." Christina Sharpe, author, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is Associate Professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Educational Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.