​​BLACK CANVAS
​A Campus Haunting

Matt Richardson

 Black Canvas is a thrilling modern gothic mystery that propels readers through a maze of plot twists and turns resembling the blockbuster films Us, Them and Antebellum. As the young, nonbinary coed ventures off to college for a new promising world, their dream turns into a living nightmare, as they are propelled through a twisted conundrum of inexplicable paradoxes and time-space wormholes that threaten to send them into an irrevocable psychosis. Confronting the deep, dark secrets of the college’s history and origin, can they put the pieces of the puzzle together in time before the campus consumes their soul? 

RAVES & REVIEWS

“Compelling! Absorbing! A tale written in the tradition of Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison, that tells of the ongoing historical hauntings at the predominantly white, Ivy League Dartmouth College. Our narrator—black, queer, unsober and brilliant—wanders the environs where so many secrets lie, only to reveal the power hidden in the near rhyme between canvas and campus.”
                                                         —Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Stanford University
 
Deftly interweaving literary, musical and visual sources, Black Canvas unsettles the hallowed ground of collegiate life and composes in its place an afterlife of campus hauntings. The result is simultaneously beautiful and harrowing, an unstoppable force that takes the reader through kaleidoscopic realities of painting and song, physics and dreams. We journey with the narrator to a place haunted by something more than ghosts, a presence bound by no place that remains with us after the ending. Necessary reading for anyone interested in dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and power shaping spaces of family, education and aspiration in our times. A bold contribution to the literatures of haunting in Black Diasporas. 
                                                         —Gillian Harkins, Professor of Literature, University of Washington, Seattle