Like Toni Morrison or James Baldwin, McKnight carries a mirror in which ghosts can be seen. They are in your neighbor’s house and yours they are that bar on Clayton Street they walk and talk all year round. His monsters are real, and they can’t be kept away with garlic. McKnight specializes in this type of horror. What follows is harrowing, not for any blood or gore, but for the threat of violence, the horror of being powerless and unable to protect your body against systems of terror built centuries ago.
His was a story within a story: A young black man obsessed with ghost tales asks his father to tell him one. But when McKnight said he was going to cut his story short because of time, the packed house booed.
Readings can be hard for fiction writers: We rarely have material short enough, and no matter how alive a story is on the page, it’s often difficult to pull it off that paper and shape it into something people want to sit and listen to. Last month, before anyone was really thinking about Halloween, Reginald McKnight read a horror story at the Avid Poetry Series.
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