Tomorrow, I release The Haunting of Zariah Monroe into the world.
Whew.
Even typing that feels different.
For weeks, I have been inviting you into Luma. I have shown you pieces of its archives, introduced you to its residents, let you examine recovered evidence, and warned you repeatedly that this city remembers more than it should.
But tomorrow there are no more warnings.
The archives open.
And on Black Indie Authors Day weekend, I cannot think of a more meaningful moment to release this particular story.
Welcome to Luma
The Haunting of Zariah Monroe follows Zariah Monroe, an Afro-surrealist artist living in the fictional coastal city of Luma.
Zariah has always painted what others cannot see.
Her work is known for its haunting beauty: faces emerging from water, shadows hiding beneath layers of pigment, memories seemingly captured on canvases that should contain nothing more than paint.
Then something changes.
A man begins appearing in her work.
Zariah doesn't know him.
At least, she doesn't think she does.
As the paintings become increasingly impossible to explain, strange things begin happening in her studio. Dreams bleed into waking life. Forgotten pieces of Luma's history begin surfacing. And Zariah finds herself confronting a terrifying possibility:
Maybe she isn't creating these images.
Maybe she's uncovering them.
Because in Luma,
some paintings remember.
This Isn't Just a Ghost Story
Yes, The Haunting of Zariah Monroe is supernatural.
Yes, things happen in this book that should absolutely make Zariah turn around, grab her purse, lock the studio and mind somebody else's business.
Unfortunately for her, we wouldn't have much of a book if she did. 😂
But beneath the supernatural elements is the story I really wanted to explore.
What do we inherit?
What does a community remember after its records have been changed?
Who gets to decide which stories become history and which disappear?
What happens when the people who were supposed to be remembered aren't?
And can something survive in memory even after every physical trace of it has been erased?
In Zariah's world, art becomes testimony.
Memory becomes evidence.
And a haunting may not mean what we think it means.
Why August 23 Matters
I didn't choose this release date randomly.
August 23 is the anniversary of my mother's passing.
Her Muslim name was Zakiyyah Muhammad.
And then there is:
Zariah Monroe.
Z.M.
The same initials.
Zariah is not my mother, and this is not my mother's story. But those initials are there intentionally.
My mother was strong, protective, spiritual, wise and funny. Long before I became an author, publisher, designer, entrepreneur or anything else I would eventually become, she gave me the first thing required for any of it.
Life.
So I wanted August 23 to become a day that holds creation alongside grief.
I wanted to place something new into the world on a date that has long represented someone leaving mine.
Tomorrow, this book carries her initials with it.
And I carry her legacy.
And Then There's the Indie Author Part
The timing of this release alongside Black Indie Authors Day feels particularly fitting.
Because this book is weird.
😂
And I mean that lovingly.
It is Black.
It is supernatural.
It is psychological.
It is spiritual.
It is artistic.
It plays with memory, ancestry, history, grief, surrealism and the boundaries between what is real and what is remembered.
It doesn't ask permission to stay neatly inside one box.
Neither do I.
And that is one of the beautiful things about being a Black independent author.
We get to tell the stories we want to tell.
Not simply the Black stories someone else has decided are marketable.
All of them.
Give me Black romance.
Black horror.
Black fantasy.
Black science fiction.
Black speculative fiction.
Black historical fiction.
Black memoir.
Black poetry.
Black children's books.
Black women solving mysteries.
Black people fighting monsters.
Black people becoming the monsters.
Black people traveling through space.
Black people communing with ancestors.
Black people falling hopelessly in love.
Black people saving worlds.
Black people creating worlds.
Black people simply existing without having to explain our existence to anybody.
There should never be one acceptable way to write Blackness.
Our literature deserves the same vastness as our humanity.
We Built Our Own Tables
Independent publishing is bigger than uploading a manuscript and putting a book up for sale.
For many Black authors, it represents ownership.
We write the manuscript.
We choose the story.
We choose the cover.
We build the audience.
We develop the marketing.
We create publishing companies.
We find editors, designers, formatters, narrators and other creatives.
We learn distribution.
We build communities.
We make mistakes.
Lord knows we make mistakes. 😂
Then we learn something and do it better the next time.
We stopped waiting for every gatekeeper to agree that our stories deserved shelf space.
We built shelves.
We built presses.
We built audiences.
We built our own tables.
And then we started pulling up chairs for one another.
That is the part of Black independent publishing I hope we continue protecting.
Community.
So, to My Fellow Black Indie Authors...
I see you.
I see the author trying to figure out formatting at 2:17 in the morning.
I see the writer with seventeen tabs open trying to understand ISBNs.
I see the person who has rewritten Chapter Three so many times that Chapter Three has become a personal enemy. 😂
I see the author refreshing a sales dashboard.
I see the writer trying to make a marketing graphic when all they really wanted to do was write.
I see the person whose manuscript is sitting quietly on a laptop because fear keeps whispering that nobody will care.
Finish it.
Seriously.
Finish the book.
The world doesn't need another version of somebody else's story from you.
It needs the one that keeps bothering you.
The strange one.
The tender one.
The uncomfortable one.
The one you don't know how to categorize.
The one you keep thinking nobody will understand.
The one only you can write.
And to the Readers...
Support Black indie authors beyond today.
Review our books.
Recommend them.
Request them at libraries.
Choose them for book clubs.
Buy directly from authors when you can.
Tell somebody when you find something good.
Post the cover.
Tag the author.
Leave the review.
That little review you think doesn't matter?
It matters.
Independent authors don't have enormous marketing machines behind every release. Sometimes our marketing department is literally us sitting on the couch in pajamas trying to remember whether we already posted on Instagram.
Ask me how I know. 😂
Word of mouth can carry an indie book farther than people realize.
If you love a Black indie author's work, be loud about it.
Tomorrow, We Open the Archives
And now my turn has come.
Tomorrow, August 23, 2026, The Haunting of Zariah Monroe leaves my hands and enters yours.
I'm excited.
I'm nervous.
I'm proud.
And somewhere underneath all of those feelings is gratitude.
Because something that once existed only inside my imagination now has a cover.
A city.
Characters.
A mythology.
An archive.
A soundtrack.
Readers.
A life outside of me.
Tomorrow, you finally get to meet Zariah properly.
You get to walk through Luma without me standing at the entrance telling you what you're allowed to see.
You get to decide what you believe.
Just remember something when you get there.
Pay attention to the paintings.
Pay attention to the water.
Pay attention to what isn't in the official record.
And if something in Luma feels strangely familiar...
Don't assume it's your imagination.
Some paintings remember.
Art never forgets the dead.
Welcome to Luma.
The Haunting of Zariah Monroe
By Bina Banks
Releases August 23, 2026
The archives open tomorrow.
Bina
0 Comments
Thank you for reading!