E.R. Bills’ novella, A Dark White Postscript, opens with a disturbing passage that could only signal the beginning of a horror story:

The figure was as black as sackcloth and it moved awkwardly in the dark. Tieg Bertram smelled it before he saw it.

It had an odor, like it was badly burnt. The reek was almost overpowering; but it was also familiar. Something that Bertram remembered from his past.

The figure moved closer.

Bertram lifted himself up on his elbows and looked around. An elderly man, his eyesight was bad in daylight, even with glasses. But at night, without them, he might as well have been blind. He didn’t notice that only the form’s lidless eyes and the front teeth of its lipless mouth caught light. The rest of its body was dark and indiscernible. Bertram could hear it, though. Its rough hide cracked as it moved.

“Hello,” Bertram said. “Hello? Who’s there?”

As Bertram sat up and fumbled for his glasses, the creature stopped.

Bertram retrieved his glasses from the nightstand and placed them over the bridge of his nose, securing the temple arms over his ears. Then, he flipped on the bedside lamp.

When Bertram’s bleary eyes finally adjusted to the light, they abruptly widened and his jaw dropped.

What happens next to poor Bertram necessitates a call to the county sheriff, Billy Dunphee. When Dunphee arrives to answer a call from Bertram’s granddaughter, he finds only a pile of ash where the body should be. As he investigates what seems to be a case of spontaneous combustion, he discovers a small town’s bloody history and a lynching involving Bertram and even one of Dunphee’s own relatives.

In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews calls A Dark White Postscript a “compact, harrowing story of a vengeful curse unleashed.” Bills is an award-winning writer and journalist from Fort Worth, Texas, and while there are elements of the supernatural in his novella, his work is rooted in the awful, and purposefully hidden, history of lynching in his home state.

Texas Monthly recognized Bills as one of the crucially important modern scholars working to correct Texas public history in order to honor the many Black people who died by lynching and other forms of racial violence, only to have their deaths covered up. Bills wrote extensively on the Slocum Massacre, a mass murder of Black people committed in Texas in the early 19th century, and eventually he was able to help the descendants of the Slocum victims erect a historical marker.

Bills is quick to acknowledge that as a white journalist, he cannot comprehend what it’s like for the Black families who are related to victims of racist violence to deal with that reality, especially when the world around them fights so hard to silence them. And while he did not intentionally set out to focus his career on racial violence in Texas, as circumstances have allowed him to be helpful in setting the historical record straight, he has been proud to play any part in creating public acknowledgment of harm done by white supremacy. He doesn’t equate his work as a horror writer to his work on events like the Slocum Massacre, but representation in fiction can be incredibly productive for raising awareness and facilitating conversations about difficult topics.

It doesn’t take a historical expert to note that while the spectral figure that visits Bertram in the opening pages of A Dark White Postscript is a work of genre fiction, hidden histories of racial violence are extremely common. “A Dark White Postscript is almost like historical fiction,” says Bills, who cites a real-life case in Greenville, Texas, that played out the same way it does in his story, involving the lynching of a young Black man named Ted Smith. “It’s a monstrosity. You run out of nomenclature, out of the right words to describe it. The real things that I’ve written about as a journalist are just as horrifying, if not more, than the fictional things I’ve written.”

Bills has always been so affected by his journalistic subject matter, by the tragedies of the past and the resistance of people in the present to acknowledging harm, that he found taking those stories as inspiration for horror came pretty easily. Which makes sense—after all, horror is a genre that has always been used to help us process our fears.

“It’s one thing to tell the story as nonfiction, but when you’re using it to create fiction, you’re really trying to inhabit it, to take on the perspective of the characters. How do you square the staggering senselessness of these acts? The truth is important. And writing it as fiction isn’t exactly cathartic. But as a journalist, I keep coming back to the question, what do we do with the ghosts of this violence? There’s no real resolution; I don’t have the answer. But I think it’s important that we get at those feelings in the deep way that fiction can help you to do.”

Bills is particularly proud of A Dark White Postscript in that it grew out of a short story he published because of how important its historical roots were to him. “So much of what I’d worked on as a journalist hadn’t left me alone,” he says, “and spontaneous combustion used to be a big trope in low-budget horror. I thought, How could I try to populate a piece of fiction that conveys the magnitude of these real-world horrors in a way that people aren’t too appalled to consider the full implications of that history?”

Kirkusnotes that in “quick, deft strokes, Bills crafts a believable cast, ratchets up the tension, and provides a thoroughly satisfying twist at the end of the tale. This short, powerful story is first-rate, thinking-person’s horror writing.”

Bills’ work to help raise awareness of the racial violence in Texas’ past, and his efforts to help living descendants of victims correct the historical record and to place public markers acknowledging where atrocities were committed, is ongoing. But he’s also found a home in the world of horror that probably couldn’t be described as “comfortable,” given the subject matter, though it certainly makes sense.

As an editor, he has worked on the ongoing anthology series Roadkill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, which is up to eight volumes. As an author, he feels a great sense of purpose in finding another outlet with which to honor the lives and experiences of people in the past, while using elements of fiction to facilitate the emotional processing that can help people better reckon with how the past affects the present. “It’s hard for me to get away from writing about things I have my heart in,” he says. “I want to write about things that challenge my readers.”

In addition to A Dark White Postscript, Bills has published the novellas Nature Calls, which Kirkus describes as “an engaging and delightful creature-feature gem,” and Tarry Tornado, which Kirkus calls an “eye-opening look at the startling impact of school sports.” The positive reception from readers and reviewers has been a pleasant surprise to Bills, and he says he is “invested in and feels strongly about” his continued work in fiction. “There’s stuff that matters that I want to get out there.”

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.