The Weight of Blood
Tiffany D. Jackson's The Weight of Blood, published in 2022, is a searing reimagining of Stephen King's Carrie that drops the original premise into a small contemporary Georgia town that still holds segregated proms. Madeleine Washington has spent her entire life passing as white at the insistence of her father, who has never come to terms with the Black mother who left them. When a sudden rainstorm at school strips the chemical relaxer from her hair, Maddy is outed as biracial in front of her classmates, and the cruelty that follows tears through her town. As the white student council debates whether the upcoming prom can finally be combined, a biracial popular girl named Kenny tries to convince her quarterback boyfriend Wendell to ask Maddy as an act of conscience. Meanwhile Maddy is discovering, in the privacy of her room, that she can move things with her mind. Jackson tells the story through a mix of present-day narration, podcast transcripts, and after-the-fact interviews, making the inevitable prom-night catastrophe into both an indictment of contemporary racism and an unforgettable horror set piece. The Weight of Blood is angry, propulsive, and one of the strongest YA horror novels of the past decade.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Weight of Blood
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Seventeen-year-old Lucy Dane lives in the small Ozark town of Henbane, Missouri, where her own mother Lila vanished without trace before Lucy could remember her. A year after Lucy's friend Cheri Stoddard is found murdered in a hollow tree, Lucy asks why no one in Henbane will talk about either case.
The most commonly searched is The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson (2022), a horror novel reimagining Stephen King's Carrie through the lens of biracial identity and contemporary high school.
Yes. Tiffany D. Jackson openly modeled The Weight of Blood on Stephen King's Carrie, transposing the central premise of telekinetic high schooler abused at home and school to a 2014 Georgia town.
The Weight of Blood is 69 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Weight of Blood takes most readers under an hour to finish.
The Weight of Blood is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Weight of Blood is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.