Constant Reader May 2026 (YA) White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson

 

 

This is Maple Street…on the last calm and reflective moment…before the monsters came.

Last year I became aware of Tiffany D. Jackson in spectacular fashion with The Weight Of Blood, the most accurate retelling Stephen King's Carrie in the half a century since it hit the best seller list. Mike Flanagan would be lucky to do half as well with the limited series he is scheduled to create of that novel as Jackson does in her version.

In typical fashion I spent the next several months looking for Jackson's previous and future novels: the superb nostalgic riff on the 1990s rap scene in Let Me Hear A Rhyme and her latest novel venture into the world of cults in The Scammer. Then this past month I managed to find White Smoke written in 2021 and what the author considered her first real attempt into the horror genre.

In hindsight maybe I shouldn't have been shocked that she managed to do so well with her version of Carrie; in her first horror novel she decided to pay tribute to arguably the first great horror TV show in history The Twilight Zone. At the center of it is one of the great episodes Rod Serling ever wrote, arguably one of the greatest episode of TV in all time.

'The Monsters are Due on Maple Street' was not the first great episode of Twilight Zone but it was by far one of the darkest Serling ever wrote. It deals when after a mysterious crash all of the power and phones go out in Maple Street. One of the kids mentions reading a comic book in which he saw aliens invade and that they looked like human. The panic starts to spread when one of the cars begins to work at random, and the neighbors start accusing each other. One of them gets shot by accident, the panic spreads and eventually they turn on each other and start burning the houses down. The final twist is one you should find later on but it delivers one of the most famous lines in TV to that point, one that could stand for both the Cold War paranoia of Serling's time and so much of 21^st century America today:

"They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and its themselves."

That episode Jackson tells us in the afterword is the book's iron spine. I might not have known for sure had Jackson not revealed it. The thing is when you look at White Smoke in its entirety you get the sense that Jackson is almost certainly putting Easter eggs in that she might not be aware of – and perhaps her intended audience might not be – but make this novel all the richer.

White Smoke is told from the perspective of Marigold Anderson, an African American teenager who has just had to leave rehab because of a mental breakdown and for circumstances Jackson's doesn't reveal until the end of the novel. Her mother is a writer who's divorced amicably from her architect father and remarried a white man named Alec. They've become a blended family: Mari has a younger brother named Sammy; Alec a ten year old named Piper.

Mari considers Piper something of a spoiled brat even though Piper's trying to get over a far darker trauma then Mari. A couple of years ago she came home to find her grandmother was dead and had to wait with her until her family came home. Piper's grandmother was the only friend the young girl had but Mari and Sammy are not warm to her – perhaps because of the color of her skin.

Mari suffers from a trauma that has to do with a fear of bedbugs that infected her house several years ago and caused her to suffer from anxiety attacks. The only think that truly alleviated them was marijuana but for reasons we won't learn until the end of the novel, her family has never wanted her to smoke again even though it’s the only thing that has any calming effect. Mari has been trying to make her way through her life on  the back of a self-help mantra "Change is good. Change is necessary. Change is needed."

At this point the Wilson family is moving from their sunny California town to a small town in an unnamed Midwest state called simply Cedarville. Her mother has decided to take a job with an organization called simply The Foundation, and as part of being an artist in residence they get a free house. The free house is wooden, decrepit, with no real furnace and barely any wi-fi signal It's almost a palace compared to the rest of the houses in this section of town which reminds Mari of the opening scenes of The Walking Dead. She barely notices the sign that says Maple Street because its barely been paid attention to.  There's no indication she's seen The Twilight Zone but she sure as hell noticed the signpost up ahead that tells them they've crossed over into a weird place.

Even the welcoming committee admits that this is a decrepit section of Cedarville but that the Foundation plans to make it better. Its only after the neighbors show up that Mari realizes that this is the prominently African-American section of the town with more black people then she's seen in her life. Mari thinks this will be a plus; she doesn't know just how bad it will be – and that's before strange things start happening in her home.

Almost from the start its clear why this house is free: there's a stench coming from it that no one can find and that everyone but Mari is willing to ignore.  Random things begin to go missing and then food starts to go missing. Mari gets a sense that there's mysterious figures around. Buddy, the family dog, begins to bark mysteriously at random. Mari starts having dreams where she's either paralyzed or unable to move or that random figures are in her room. One of the neighbor, Mr. Watson, tells them that there were three different contract companies in four months that had to work the house but never tells anybody why.

One wonders if Jackson is writing so much of White Smoke as a tongue-in-cheek rebuke to Eddie Murphy's famous routine about why you'd never see a black family in a horror movie. "You white folks see blood in the toilet; you go get Ajax."  The difference is the Wilson family isn't entirely staying out of blindness; they cleaned out their savings to put Mari through rehab and a free house is something they can't sneeze at. Of course, there's the added joke that Alec, the white man in the family, thinks that everything is normal which is pretty much keeping with it.

The reference to Mari that might remind fans of Twilight Zone is another classic 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet' where William Shatner plays a man who suffered a mental breakdown while flying on a plane and is now on a flight for the first time since then when he sees a gremlin on the wing that no one else does. He spends the entire episode first wrestling with his sanity and when he realizes no one will listen to him because of his mental condition, manages to steal a gun and shoots the gremlin off. At the end of the episode he's being assured he'll be all right and he tells his wife: "I know. But I'm the only one who knows…right now." When the final shot reveals the damaged wing, we realize that there is a double triumph: when the aircraft looks at the plane they'll realize that something was on the wing and that Shatner's character wasn't insane.

Mari's condition mirrors that episode, not just because of how her anxiety is triggered by panic attacks – which we finally see happen in horrible detail in the middle of the book – but also because of her former addiction. On multiple occasions her mother feels that it's necessary to do a drug test on her, and we know all of this is conditional on if the relationship doesn't work, she's willing to live with her father again. Furthermore Mari is hampered by her own guilt over what she believes she's caused her family to do, particularly with her younger brother and that she doesn't deserve to be happy. Mari has come to Cedarville because she wants a fresh start and for that reason it takes her a little longer to realize the weirdness.

To be clear some of it comes immediately when Mr. Sterling (Serling with a T!) shows up at their home in the kind of smiling reassuring attitude that would not be uncommon with the representatives of the devil that kept showing up in a lot of Twilight Zone episodes. When they are invited to the introductory gala of The Sterling Foundation the first thing Mari and Sammy notice is that their family is basically the only people of color among all the suits and ties. They also notice that Cedarville's plans for a brand new community go right through where their new home is. Mari wonders how the hell they're going to rebuild where an entire neighborhood is.

When she gets to high school things are even odder. For one thing, there are almost a dozen girls to every boy and the population is almost entirely African-American. The only two people she makes connections with are Yussef, one of the few teenagers who lives in her neighborhood and Erika, one of the only people who has access to weed. The entire high school treats her coldly but Mari attributes it to being the new girl.

Eventually Mari learns about some of the stranger things about this town. How Sterling's brother used to be governor and enacted the Sterling Laws who thought 'drugs were the devil's work as gave mandatory minimums of 20 years for weed. As Erica tells it:

 "He convinced white folks that weed would turn people into addicts who would rob, loot and kill…He dedicated the entire city's budget to 'cleaning the streets. Police were riding around like an army, walking into houses, offices, restaurants, schools, hospitals with no warrants. After the first wave, they started getting greedy, planting drugs on folks."

The prison population grew 900 percent, schools and hospitals started shutting down, folks to the street. And that was the first match that lit up the last riots."

All of this would be familiar to Serling, who lived through the McCarthy era, tried to tell the narrative of Emmett Till in two TV movies that the censors cut to bits and who always argued for civil rights throughout his show – which ended right around the time the riots were starting in Ghettos like Newark and Watts. He would often write about dystopian societies where the state has too much power, most notably in 'The Obsolete Man' where all books and religion is banned. Serling knew that it doesn't take much to build the kind of world Jackson does and he would appreciate her prose.

As White Smoke progresses Jackson tells us of greater sins that deal with Cedarville's past included why the town doesn't celebrate Halloween, the connections the families in power have to run this town and the great generational and original sin that Maple Street is suffering from that dates back decades. It explains much of what has happened in all of Cedarville and why so many in this neighborhood act the way they do; it's not so much a racial one as one of a witch hunt that may have been orchestrated by greater forces. It makes clear that this is a parallel for what Mari is living through right now; she believes she has to punish herself the way this entire neighborhood thinks it has to.

I'm reminded of other Easter eggs throughout the show: most notably how there's a televangelist who always seems to be on quoting the Bible, selling snake oil (or false seeds) and telling everyone to repent. This reminds me of 'Eye of The Beholder', where in a hospital in some unknown place, a leader is preaching conformity while a young woman waits to see if a surgery that will remedy her horrible deformity has worked. Serling never gave an explanation as to where and when that world was; Jackson gives a very real why this preacher is and that he has a very real purpose.

Jackson says that in the afterward that while she is making an entry into the horror genre she believes she's keeping a toe in the psychological thriller space. That is true but only in the sense that The Twilight Zone managed to do both effectively. So much of what she puts into this novel –  powerful forces manipulating small people behind the scenes, the rich and powerful taking from those with less, the use of authority to clamp down on any signs of resistance and using their ability to placate the mob – are very much themes that Serling and his crew of writers would freely make use of in their body of work.

And she demonstrates the ability which I have seen in her later works to emulate Hitchcock when he said he wanted to play the audience like a piano. She does so in so many exceptional sequences that will scare anyone with a pulse. My personal favorite (?) involves the alarms that Mari has set on her phone to remind her of her schedule. One morning she wakes up early to reminder that she doesn't remember setting and in quick succession they become almost omniscient and terrifying with each new reminder.

 And she frequently undercuts with jet black comedy, most of it coming from Alec who is the typical white man who really believes there's an explanation for everything no matter how bad things get. The closest emulation to 'Maple Street' comes when the power goes out in the Anderson home and then the entire street goes black. Eventually the light comes on in their home but no one else's and the entire neighborhood comes ready to raise a mob. Jackson makes it clear just how scary and hysterical this scene is at the same time when everything Alec says pisses everybody else off even when makes no sense:

Oh I see, so you think having power in your fancy new home makes you better than us?

"Fancy?" Alec chuckles. "Have you seen this block.

Someone gasps; the outrage visceral.

"So the Wood ain't good enough for you?" a man yells.

What should be terrifying almost seems to be absurd when they accuse one of the sons of suspicious behavior "because he's walking that dog around." When everything resolves itself the mob disperses and doesn't even apologize even though they completely overreacted.

Though much of Jackson's writing is aimed at white privilege, the even-handedness towards race is clear in this book. Yes the people in Maplewood have a right to be upset but they have spent the entire period taking their aggression out on the wrong people rather than those in power.  She sees very clearly that manipulation has never been a one-way street.

I've been relatively vague on what so much of this book is really about, being content to describe it more on mood then anything else. I believe that's the right approach when you're talking about a horror novel more than most genres. So I'm going to conclude this review with a brief discussion of The Twilight Zone.

There have been multiple attempts to revive it like clockwork almost every twenty years and whether the writers are Harlan Ellison or Jordan Peele, it never lasts as long and is rarely as high in quality. I believe that the problem is that they have tried to copy the mood of the stories but not Serling's approach. Serling would have worn the label social justice warrior proudly had it existed and he did his best to walk the walk when running The Twilight Zone. He did stories which had African-Americans at the lead at times and even hired female directors to work for the show when few would consider it done. More importantly that attitude was reflecting in the stories he told where he used the mask of sci-fi and horror to tell stories where the wicked were punished and the good rewarded. Almost none of the stories in the revivals were willing to do that.

Would Serling look at the world today and be disappointed? Actually I think, like the liberals of the time, he'd be more understanding and say that things only seem worse now then they were when he was first making The Twilight Zone. The idea of an African-American being the creative force behind a revival would have been inconceivable to him when he died too young in 1975. Now such things happen regularly. The world is not a utopia but Serling knew first hand that utopias are dull when you write about them in fiction and almost certainly less fun to live in then they appear. There's no arc of the universe, just an arrow steadily moving. It may move slower then some people want, faster than others, but it keeps moving regardless despite the efforts of those who want to hold it back or push it backwards.

That may be reflected in the ending of White Smoke. For all its very real bleakness, Jackson ends her story in a place more optimistic than Serling would for his Maple Street even if it may not be apparent to Mari or even the reader. Survival is its own victory and she has made a journey that would have been unthinkable at the start of the novel. By the end of the book she has changed her maxim:

"Change is good. Change is not always necessary. But the right change is most definitely needed. "

Serling said something similar in the end narration of another episode:

"…No matter what the future brings, man's capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to outfight, outpoint and outlive any changes made by his society, for which three cheers and a unanimous decision rendered from the Twilight Zone.

Jackson's character believe in Serling's philosophy and that's to be applauded as much as anything. That shouldn't be confined to the Twilight Zone either and Jackson's characters believe it.