I’ll Make a Spectacle of You

• Author: Beatrice Winifred Iker
• Genre: Horror
• Publication Date: November 18, 2025
• Publisher: Run For It

Thank you to Orbit and Oliver Wehner for sending me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This heart-pounding Southern-Gothic horror debut takes readers to Bricksbury Mountain College, the oldest and most storied HBCU in the nation. But as one student is about to find out, with a long history comes a legacy of secrets.

Zora Robinson is an ambitious grad student in her dream program, Appalachian studies, at Bricksbury Mountain College. When her thesis advisor hands her a strange diary and suggests she research the local folklore about a beast roaming the woods surrounding campus, Zora finds a community uneager to talk to an outsider.

As she delves deeper into the history of the beast, she uncovers a rumored secret society called the Keepers that has tenuous ties. To the beast … and to Bricksbury itself. Zora soon finds herself plagued by visions of the past, and her grip on reality starts to slip as she struggles to uncover what is real and what is folklore. But when a student goes missing, Zora starts to wonder if the Keepers ever really disbanded.

There’s something in the woods, and it has its eyes on Zora.

Ninth House but make it Black? YES PLEASE! In this outstanding debut, Beatrice Winifred Iker does exactly that—taking a dark academia story and setting it at the nation’s oldest and most well-known HBCU (it’s a fictional school) right in the backwoods of Tennessee. 

This works perfectly for Zora, who is a graduate student studying Black Appalachian folklore and culture. She’s also well-versed in conjure, rootwork, and hoodoo, traditional Black folk magic practices. I loved the exploration of her spiritual, ancestor, and traditional forms of connection that Zora not only practices, but how she learns about and incorporates new and different methods to her own practice. 

Zora is a character that I found incredibly easy to empathize with. She is a study in contradictions. Zora has a strong connection to her family and especially her ancestors, yet her relationship with her own family is strained, especially with her estranged sister. She has her feet on the ground and a level head, yet sometimes she drifts off into the clouds. She is practical, yet is getting a graduate degree in Appalachian studies, which I imagine would truly limit her job prospects outside of a specific region. And most of the time she feels reliable, but at times, her narration had me questioning if she was actually reliable. Plus, sometimes she made some dumb decisions that had me reading while peeking through my fingers.

This story incorporates a few different deeper, heavier themes. The first one that arises is racism and the violence associated with it. However even this is subject to the interplay of other factors, and in this book, racism intersects with socioeconomic status:

“That was the thing about Appalachia. It wasn’t that racism didn’t exist; it was that active racism was a luxury reserved for those who could afford it.”

Racist violence still exists, as well as implied gender violence in a scene in the beginning of the book. This also leads to the major divide between Zora and her older sister, Jasmine. Protecting the school from violence is also a major undertaking, and Amias and Hosanna, the siblings who founded Bricksbury, use their own conjure and hoodoo abilities. 

Conjure, rootwork, and hoodoo are fascinating topics. While I have heard of them, I don’t know much about them since they are closed practices (as opposed to an open practice, such as Wicca). According to the impression I got from the descriptions in the book, it is a complex interaction between Christian faith, African and New World traditions, and found the discussions of Zora’s protective spells and charms to be so interesting.

However, it isn’t long before other things come into play. Zora’s sexuality is another layer of complexity, with her queerness being another factor that impacted her own relationship with Jasmine. While Bricksbury is a welcoming haven for Black students as well as those who are queer, other aspects of Bricksbury felt not-so-welcomig.

The southern gothic aspects of this are present from very early on. The folklore surrounding the beast of the forest quickly consumes Zora, while it’s clear that Zora is going to play a major role in the story. The generational trauma passed down from enslaved ancestors and those subject to a culture of racism and violence and oppression comes up in the story, and really portrays conjure and hoodoo as a means of honoring ancestors and relying on herbs, roots, and crystals for protective purposes.

While there was a lot about the story that I loved, there were a few things that didn’t work well for me. First of all, the pacing felt a little uneven. At first, the story is really slow to get rolling, while the ending felt a bit rushed. Some of the twists were predictable, although there was at least one that got me good. I would have liked to see side characters who were more thoroughly developed, since they seem a bit flat compared to Zora, Amias, and Hosanna. There are also sections cut directly from the mysterious diary Zora receives, which are journal entries by a Mrs. Esther Fisherman, who works as a librarian and lives on the grounds of Bricksbury. I found those so interesting, although the font was tough to read. Additionally, at times it felt like Iker was a bit heavy handed when discussing gender identity and sexuality. 

Overall, there was a lot more about the book that worked for me than the few things that didn’t. I loved the centering of an HBCU for this dark academia, and the folklore and practices of the Black community of Appalachia, referred to as ‘Affrilachia.’ The story ranges from mildly creepy to mildly scary, but the story wasn’t one that was outright terrifying. Instead, I’d classify this as on the far side of horror-lite, without delving directly into actual horror that has me locking a book in the closet and getting rid of it as soon as humanly possible. Yes, that has happened to me in the past. But this was the kind of book that really grabbed me early on, and that I thoroughly enjoyed. 

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