American Nightmare by Kelly McWilliams
Crown (September 15, 2026)
Reviewed by Haley Newlin 
Kelly McWilliams has disrupted my prematurely curated list of top reads of the year. In fact, American Nightmare is in the running for the number-one spot, alongside Markus Redmond’s Blood Slaves, Tamika Thompson’s The Curse of Hester Gardens, and Del Sandeen’s These Walls Remember.
McWilliams, known for writing YA horror books like Mirror Girls, has crafted an unflinching, unforgettable, and unputdownable read with her adult fiction debut, American Nightmare. The story takes place in the early 1900s, beginning with an introduction to what Clark calls “the Nightmare,” in 1906 during the Atlanta Race Riots. This encounter with the Nightmare—the creeping presence of it, then the immediate chaos and violence that accompanies it—sticks with Clark. It looms over him like a demonic entity, disturbing any sense of peace and inciting hesitancy and fear. It’s with him as he’s denied entry into the army due to his racial ambiguity, where he hoped to serve alongside his childhood friends and high school football teammates. He senses it riding on the train with him from Georgia to New York City. It’s metallic and gasoline scent polluting the air. And this is why he answers the NAACP’s call for white- passing men.
But not everyone appreciates a white-passing man. There’s mistrust in the eyes of Clark’s own people and suspicion in those of white men. It’s a dangerous balance, and the mission is clear: pass as white to investigate lynchings in the South and report back to the NAACP.
After each report, the NAACP raises a large flag outside their window that reads: A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY. The introduction of American Nightmare features a letter from the publisher’s senior editor that includes a line about Black horror. It reads: “…the propulsive force that defines Black horror [is] its urgency, its reckoning, and its insistence on being felt as much as it is feared.”
McWilliams hits each of these marks. There’s urgency in the rising number of reported lynchings, and the use of the NAACP flag holds readers in Clark’s findings and reminds us that this isn’t some small-town folk monster or a ghost isolated to the confines of the home it haunts; the Nightmare creeps every which way, and it moves fast.
Being a YA horror author, McWilliams is a master of portraying the theme of the loss of innocence. For Clark, it begins in 1906, when the mob’s at his door, and continues as he learns how close the nightmare has been to him all along, and how it follows him into places he assumed were safe, like the North. For Sam, loss of innocence doesn’t stem from witnessing horror but from unleashing it upon others, wielding it like so many before him, feeding on it.
I really appreciated the historical elements in this read and learned so much about the NAACP and the fight for anti-lynching legislation. I left the story with a new list of nonfiction titles to check out, including Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 and the urge to reread P. Djèlí Clark’s 2020 historical and fantasy horror novella, Ring Shout.
American Nightmare is among the best horror releases of 2026 and should make every historical fiction and horror reader’s TBR. I recommend it for fans of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, and P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout.
