In 1970s Mississippi, a Black detective and his temporary partner are assigned to a case that shifts from murder to paranormal conspiracy with life-altering repercussions.

Wenton, Mississippi: A man enters the bathroom of a local gay bar and doesn’t come back out. Instead he’s found cold, on the floor, and facing the wall. And no one seems to know how this happened.

Samuel Barkley is Wenton’s only Black detective. Assigned to the case, Samuel’s one goal is to keep his head down with eyes on moving up in the police ranks. But it’s not easy with Harvey, a new, temporary partner who Samuel can’t seem to like…or hate. Nor with the cold, questioning eyes and fake smiles from those in town. Persistent. Judging. Wrong. Samuel is reaching his breaking point.

As his investigation leads him to a curious plane crash cover-up, Samuel’s placid existence is turned on its head. Because what crashed in Wenton isn’t a plane. There are others here. They like it here. And if Samuel can’t stop them, they will find a way to stay.

With shades of The X-Files and S. A. Cosby, There Used to Be People Here deftly explores race, queerness, and existing as other in a society that demonizes everything different.

I received an advance copy of this book courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

I didn’t really know what to expect going into this one, but dang, I really enjoyed it! The writing is strong and tense, and it grabbed me from the get-go and never loosened its grip.

The story takes place in Wenton, Mississippi, in the 1970s. A man walks into the bathroom of a local gay bar and never walks back out. Eventually he’s found on the floor, cold, facing the wall, and nobody can explain what happened. The case lands with Samuel Barkley, the only Black detective in town. Samuel mostly wants to stay out of trouble and work his way up the ranks, but that gets harder with a temporary partner named Harvey, whom he can’t quite decide how to feel about. As he digs, he runs into a cover-up around an alleged plane crash, but he soon learns that whatever fell from the sky in Wenton wasn’t a plane. Something else is in town now, and it has plans to make it its own.

I loved that the book is set in the 1970s. Back then, people were obsessed with aliens and UFOs, and Cole takes that real-life craze and uses it to paint a picture of a town overrun by an alien life force that has taken over people’s bodies, a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And that’s not a spoiler, it’s apparent after the first chapter that body snatching is happening, so the rest of the book is the characters working out what’s going on and how to stop it.

But the monsters are only part of what makes this book intense. Cole does an amazing job showing that the everyday horrors faced by people who aren’t straight, white, and Christian can be just as unnerving as the creatures who are seemingly the bigger threat. The main characters are queer and Black, and they want to live authentically as themselves. To stay safe, though, they have to change who they are. They pretend to be straight, and they move and speak in ways that keep white people comfortable. That’s not so different from the aliens, who are also pretending to be people they’re not. This parallel gives the whole story an extra weight that I didn’t go in expecting. (And I loved it!)

The book is tense and moves at a brisk pace, and it has a lot to say along the way. Also, I did a tandem read of this one, and Christopher Ian Grant’s voice acting was fantastic. If you’re an audiobook lover, definitely check it out.

If you like alien horror with a historical backdrop and a story that has something real to say about race, queerness, and what it costs to fit in, this is definitely a book you should check out!

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