Here is a story as thrilling as it is too closely aligned with reality, with a creep factor much like that in Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out. Though in this Brooklyn-based novel the targeted group for exile is based on class more than race, there are countless examples made through Sydney’s perspective showcasing microagressions (and outright aggression) regularly lobbed at Black people. The relationship that develops between Sydney, a Black woman and longtime resident of Gifford Place, and Theo, a white man who bought a home with his now ex-girlfriend, is endearing and cringeworthy, both. He’s newly unemployed and volunteers to help Sydney do research for the tour she is hoping to start up to amplify the exemplary Black history of their neighborhood. She’s dubious of his offer and when he shows up one day in a BLM shirt she insists they come up with a code word for when he inevitably lets his white feelings get too big/in the way.

Despite her work on the tour Sydney is mostly distracted by bills and pressure from developers to give up the house her mother took such pride in. Her best friend who has her own apartment in Sydney’s childhood home seems to be getting fed up with Sydney’s odd behavior and calls keep coming in trying to track down money owed on the house. She’s not exactly in a stable mental state when... odd things keep happening. Among other uncomfortable situations, the owner of another home on the block and the nearby bodega both disappear, overnight, replaced with overt racists. But Sydney isn’t crazy, Theo is there witnessing Gifford Place undergoing its horrific change. The pair will have to figure out the cause, or leave the neighborhood, dead or alive.