To become what you dream to be, the old you must DIE! Getting ahead takes sacrifice, commitment, and the ability to “integrate” into the company culture while abandoning your own culture. Alaminti Dranas has heard it all from her boss before. As one of only two black women in her office, even she’s starting to believe the one idea she has resisted. That idea? That the odds are stacked against blacks and other minorities, black women especially. This is no more evident to her than when the newest hire gets what should have been Alaminti’s promotion. Just over ten years of dutiful service ignored for flimsy reasons. She’s grown tired of that narrative. But work is currently the most important thing in her life. There has to be a way to get ahead. Indeed, there is. Things start to change when she is invited to join a mysterious group that promises untold success. “We make dreams come true.” All Alaminti has to do is make it through an extended initiation process that far exceeds the bounds of normal. In fact, what they want her to do is outrageous, unsafe, maybe even deadly. But with her life both at home and at work stagnant, she gives in to quiet desperation. Little does she know how much things will change, how much she will change, how much she will lose. For only after the process begins do her nightmares start, her sanity falters, the “beasts” come, and she grows obsessed with asking her mirror one question: What am I becoming? A social-thriller horror, BLAnd (pronounced as the single word “bland”) stalks the reader down a twisted path of mysteries and frights as it touches upon the meaning of self-identity and the propagation of culture from one group to another. Based on a 2011 short story of the same name, it shares flavor with Jordan Peele’s work in the horror genre, and also Hari Kunzru’s ghost story White Tears.