Ryan Douglass

The Taking of Jake Livingston puts a Black gay teenager who can see the dead into a mostly white private school, and gives him the ghost of a school shooter who has decided to use him for something. Douglass is a Black queer writer from Atlanta who published essays about the publishing industry before the novel, and the book gives at least as much weight to what the school does to Jake on an ordinary Tuesday as to the thing haunting him, which is the point being made.