American Nightmare by Kelly McWilliams asks where evil really comes from

What if the monster haunting you isn’t a supernatural creature at all, but the hatred of ordinary people—and what if the only way to fight it is to become one of them? That question sits at the heart of Kelly McWilliams’s American Nightmare, a haunting historical thriller inspired by the life and work of civil rights activist Walter F. White.

Releasing September 15, 2026, American Nightmare follows Clark Wendell White, a light-skinned Black man who first encounters what he calls the Nightmare as a child during the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. As Clark and his father stand guard over their family home, a white boy named Sam Cahill tries to redirect the mob toward them. When Clark and Sam lock eyes, Clark sees something in Sam that frightens him even more than the mob itself. He sees what he believes is an evil presence, something that wasn’t there before. From that moment forward, the Nightmare becomes a presence in Clark’s life, although he is never entirely certain whether it is something supernatural or a manifestation of the trauma he experienced as a child.

Years later, Clark is struggling to find his place in a country that doesn’t know what to do with a Black man who looks white. The Army refuses to accept him into its all-Black regiment because he doesn’t look Black enough. But as a Black man, he’s also not welcome in the white regiments. Clark flounders after his closest friends go off to war without him, never to return alive. Then he discovers an opportunity with the NAACP in New York. The organization is looking for light-skinned Black men who can pass as white and infiltrate places where Black investigators would never be allowed. Clark decides to take the job, despite his father’s warning that passing as white could mean selling his soul. Clark sees it differently. If he can’t fight overseas, then this will be his war.

American Nightmare is historical fiction loosely based on the life of Walter F. White, who famously passed as white while investigating lynchings and other acts of racial violence for the NAACP. As with many fictional accounts based on real people, McWilliams takes considerable liberties with the historical record, both for the sake of the story and, as the novel acknowledges, out of respect for the people whose lives were destroyed by the lynchings and massacres that form the historical backdrop.

What McWilliams creates from that history is not simply a fictionalized biography. American Nightmare uses the story of Walter White as a foundation for a much larger examination of evil, identity, trauma, and the ways people convince themselves that someone else is responsible for their failures. The question of what, exactly, the Nightmare is becomes one of the novel’s most compelling threads.

Clark’s first encounter with Sam is frightening precisely because he doesn’t know whether he is witnessing something supernatural. As a child, Clark has no other way to make sense of the hatred and violence he is seeing. He sees something change in Sam’s eyes, and the idea of the Nightmare gives that evil a shape. Even as an adult, Clark sometimes finds himself metaphorically standing at the top of a dizzying staircase that seems to spiral downward forever whenever he encounters a situation that reminds him of the violence of his childhood.

To me, those moments read very much like a manifestation of trauma. Clark’s mind and body are responding to something so overwhelming that he can’t simply experience it as an ordinary memory. But the novel deliberately leaves room for another interpretation. Maybe the Nightmare really is an entity. Maybe something did enter Sam that day. Maybe it has been following Clark ever since. That ambiguity makes the supernatural elements particularly effective because McWilliams never allows the reader to settle comfortably on one explanation.

Sam’s story becomes increasingly important as the novel progresses, but his path to Clark is not a simple matter of an old enemy deliberately tracking him down. After the events of Clark’s childhood, Sam’s life takes him in a very different direction. He eventually moves to New York with a woman who leaves him for another man—one with more money and better prospects. From there, Sam’s life begins to unravel. His choices, his failures, and his inability to accept responsibility for where he has ended up leave him angry, isolated, and frightened. Then, already living in New York, he unexpectedly encounters Clark.

Sam had forgotten Clark existed. But once he recognizes him, Clark becomes a convenient target for all the resentment Sam has been carrying. Rather than examining the decisions that brought him to the miserable place where he finds himself, Sam can blame Black people—and eventually Clark in particular—for everything that has gone wrong. And that, I think, gets to the crux of the Nightmare.

Is evil something that infects people from the outside? Is there an actual entity that spreads hatred from one person to another? Or is the Nightmare simply what happens when ordinary people become so consumed by fear, resentment, and the need to blame someone else that they stop taking responsibility for their own actions?

Sam’s downward spiral makes the second possibility especially disturbing because there is nothing particularly supernatural about his hatred. He isn’t a cartoon villain who wakes up one morning and decides to become evil. He is a man who makes bad decisions, experiences disappointment, and gradually finds it easier to blame other people than to confront his own failures. Black people become a convenient scapegoat for everything he believes has been taken from him. And once he finds Clark again, that resentment has somewhere to land.

Meanwhile, the Nightmare itself appears to be spreading north. The Ku Klux Klan is finding a foothold in New York City, and Clark is forced to confront the possibility that the evil he encountered as a child is not confined to the South. As he investigates the people and forces behind the violence, the Nightmare begins to reveal itself as something very different from what he originally imagined.

The deeper Clark goes, the more the supernatural mystery starts pointing toward something that is much more deeply rooted in American history. That is where American Nightmare becomes particularly unsettling. The novel asks whether we really need a supernatural explanation for evil when human beings have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they are perfectly capable of creating their own.

McWilliams connects the Nightmare to something that has been embedded in American society since before its founding. The hatred Clark encounters isn’t an isolated phenomenon, nor is it simply the product of a few particularly cruel individuals. It is part of a much larger system of fear, racial hierarchy, exploitation, and scapegoating. The supernatural elements don’t replace that reality; they give it another way to be examined.

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I also really appreciated the magical realism surrounding Clark’s friendship with Davey. Clark and Davey once promised one another that they would look after each other when they went to war, never knowing that only one of them would actually make it there. Later, when Clark’s own war on American soil becomes dangerous, Davey appears at his side and continues to have his back.

That relationship provides a beautiful counterpoint to the Nightmare. If hatred can seem to take on a life of its own, so can love and loyalty. Davey’s presence suggests that Clark is not entirely alone, even when he is forced to live a life in which almost no one can know who he really is. Because Clark’s struggle with identity is every bit as important as his battle against the Nightmare.

Clark is a Black man whose skin allows him to pass as white, but that whiteness comes with a complicated and painful history. His ancestors were enslaved people, while the white ancestry that makes Clark and his father and sister so light-skinned came through the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Clark belongs culturally and historically to the descendants of enslaved people, yet the white people whose ancestry he carries would never have considered him one of them.

Passing gives him access to a world that would otherwise be closed to him, but it also leaves him profoundly isolated. When Clark is passing as white, the white people around him aren’t his people. He knows that if they discovered who he really was, many of them would reject him. Yet when he encounters Black people, he sees them lower their heads as he passes because they believe he is white.

For a long time, no one truly sees Clark. That becomes especially heartbreaking because Clark is doing incredibly brave work that very few people will ever know about. He is putting his life at risk to investigate lynchings and expose the people responsible, but he can’t claim credit for what he accomplishes. Remaining safe and effective in his work requires him to remain incognito, which means the people he is fighting for may never know what he has done.

His father’s concern that Clark is selling his soul by passing as white therefore carries more weight than it might initially seem. Clark isn’t simply putting on a disguise. He is being forced to inhabit an identity that gives him privileges denied to other Black Americans while simultaneously reminding him of the brutal history that created the very circumstances allowing him to pass. And yet Clark does it because he believes the alternative is worse.

He has already watched his friends leave for war and never return. He has already been told that he cannot serve because his skin makes him too white to fight alongside other Black soldiers. Now he has the opportunity to wage a different kind of war, one in which his ability to cross racial boundaries becomes a weapon. The irony is that to fight the Nightmare, Clark has to become one of the people the Nightmare represents.

That makes his journey much more complicated than a straightforward battle between good and evil. Clark isn’t simply trying to defeat a monster. He is trying to understand whether the monster exists outside of people at all, while simultaneously being forced to disguise himself as the very people whose hatred he is investigating.

American Nightmare is at its strongest when it allows those contradictions to remain unresolved. The novel is a historical thriller, but it is also a ghost story, a story about trauma, and an exploration of the psychological damage caused by being forced to live between identities. The magical realism gives the story an eerie quality without allowing the reader to forget that the most frightening parts are grounded in actual history.

And that may be the novel’s most effective trick. The supernatural elements make us look for a monster, but the historical reality keeps reminding us that we don’t necessarily need one. The Nightmare may be an evil entity. It may be trauma given a face. It may be the hatred that people pass from one generation to the next. Or it may be something even more fundamental: the human tendency to blame someone else when our own lives aren’t turning out the way we hoped. Whatever the answer, Clark has to confront it.

American Nightmare is a gripping and unsettling historical novel that uses the life of Walter F. White as the starting point for a much larger story about race, identity, trauma, and the nature of evil. Kelly McWilliams blends historical reality with supernatural and magical realism elements to create a story that feels both rooted in the past and disturbingly relevant.

If you enjoy historical fiction that isn’t afraid to take some risks with the genre, American Nightmare is worth adding to your list. Beneath the mystery of the Nightmare is a much more troubling question: what if the most terrifying monsters aren’t supernatural at all? What if they’re ordinary people who decide that someone else is responsible for everything that has gone wrong in their lives?

Do you think the Nightmare in American Nightmare is a supernatural evil, a manifestation of trauma, or something much more human—and perhaps much more frightening? I’d love to hear how you interpreted it. Share your thoughts in the comments and join the conversation!

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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