A master of the Black horror genre, author Tananarive Due’s latest project is a graphic novel co-written by Steven Barnes and illustrated by Marco Finnegan— inspired by a creative impulse she got at a young age when she spent the night in the same room as her great-grandmother, whose emphysema made he struggle to breathe and young Due thought her beloved great-grandmother might not make it through the night. “It was my first real glimpse into mortality,” Due tells BET.com.

The Keeper tells Aisha’s story, a young Black girl whose parents are killed in a car crash, forcing her to move from the suburbs to the inner city of Detroit with her aging grandmother, who rents a small room in a crumbling brownstone her family used to own. But the grandmother’s health soon declines, then freefalls, leaving Aisha trapped in the apartment with her grandmother’s corpse. But because her grandmother is determined to keep her flesh and blood out of the abusive child welfare system she herself suffered from, she uses her last breath to summon a dark spirit — The Keeper — a creature who protects, but at the cost of others’ lives.

History has always been a significant element in Due's work, but the preservation of Black families via selfless acts of sacrifice has always been at the forefront. Due originally wanted The Keeper to be a film — this is still her wish — but after working with Barnes and Finnegan, she’s “in love with the collaborative aspect of the graphic novel.”

For Barnes, The Keeper’s message has a cascade of implications for societal questions of survival and community. “What is this little girl willing to do to survive? Individuals do not survive well in the wild. Couples do a lot better, and so do families. Tribes do better still. And she is in this awful situation because she's afraid to turn herself into a social agency.”

Many marginalized people are afraid of slipping into a system designed to break them. And that dread is frequently created in us by our families, who work tirelessly to keep us out of the hands of the state. Finnegan says growing up Chicano in Southern California, “My mom would always stress to me that if something happened when  I was home alone (especially at night when she was working) to go to a neighbor for help first because calling the police or an ambulance could lead to me being taken away. Seeing that aspect of life reflected in The Keeper script was really touching because I assumed we were the only family that felt like that...kids didn't share that kind of stuff back in the day, for the same reasons.”

BET.com: What first inspired this story?

Tananarive Due: The first seedling started when I was a young girl, probably a little even younger than Aisha. I spent the night in my great-grandmother's room. I was very blessed to know my great-grandmother and have a relationship with her. She had emphysema, so she was on an oxygen machine. The hissing of the machine was very frightening to me. Being alone with her in the room was also frightening to me because I was thinking, "What if something happens? I don't know what to do."

I looked at her and had this revelation that in the future, at some point, I could or would be that old woman in that bed who couldn't breathe without a machine. On a personal level, that was the seed for The Keeper. This idea that as a child you feel overwhelmed by responsibility, overwhelmed by death — and life. But what do you do?

BET.com: This story also sends a strong message about various social issues, especially housing insecurity and the child welfare system.

TD: Aisha's relationship with policing and how her family was treated in the neighborhood, where they lived before her parents died, and how her grandmother kind of fell out of wealth over time, were all things I wanted to explore. They used to own the building. Now she has to rent her little tiny room from someone else, and her sister is in a nursing home. There is a lot of housing insecurity in this story. All of these characters in some way or another have been displaced.

The Keeper is this creature that the grandmother can conjure to try to give Aisha some security in a world that doesn't really offer a lot for a young Black girl. And the grandmother's experience with an abusive dorm master at the orphanage where she and her sister grew up made the grandmother really obsessive about trying to protect Aisha from the system. The notion that this young girl would have a creature who takes care of her, but who kills everyone around her.

BET.com: What was the collaboration process like for this graphic novel?

Steven Barnes: When you're collaborating, you have to basically act as if you're two parts of the same brain. Tananarive is both an instinctive and calculating writer, and her instincts are tied in with values and beliefs, and old memories. So I had to dig in there and ask questions. I remember us figuring out the nature of the creature. One of the things that I've learned is that if you're gonna write about a monster, you have to remember that on its terms, it's just an animal. You either relate its behavior to the actions of some earthly animal you understand in which it wants to survive, in which it eats, reproduces, and will die one day. Or you could conceivably relate it to a natural force — water, wind, fire.

Because if you don't relate it to anything, then it has no inwardness.

But my job was to be in another lobe of her brain. My involvement was more philosophical. How can I help you in creating the strongest presentation?

BET.com: And as a graphic novel, the artistry is such a core part as well. What was that process like?

Marco Finnegan: When I got the comic book script, the first thing I thought was "Does anybody know that this is out there? Because someone's gonna take it away from me." It was such a visually written screenplay that it was easy to translate into a comic book. If Steven's one extra lobe, I'm the extra lobe that has hands.

SB: I always say Marco was the director, he was the actors, he was the set director, he was the cinematographer, he was the special effects guy. He's being very modest. The truth is that the artist is incredibly important in a process like this.

MF: The challenge was trying to capture fear and tension from something that isn't jumping out. Comics don't work like that. There are not a lot of jump scares. This is a horror graphic novel, but there's sadness and hopefulness.

But the fear is so relatable and so palpable. I grew up in an apartment with a single mom and was scared of the dark. My kids are scared of the dark and when I first had kids I would get up in the middle of the night to put my hand on their chest to check if they were breathing. There wasn't a spectacle at the heart of this. It's just a story about a family.

BET.com: What was most challenging about it?

MF: Trying to keep it grounded. There aren't a lot of locations. There's no spaceships, there's no aliens, I'm not drawing 60 buildings for every panel. It needed more acting and thankfully I have an 11-year-old daughter at home. There was a lot of posing and sketching of her, figuring out how she moves, and tapping into all that stuff. Every single time you see Aisha, my daughter was in that pose or in a variation of that pose at some point. And even for the brownstone, it was so well described that I didn't feel like I could do it. So I had somebody build a 3D model of it and rotated it in space and had the apartment built to the specifications so that I could have variety without being lazy.

For something like this, being specific was important because it's an intimate story. I'm drawing James Bond right now, and drawing The Keeper was harder than drawing James Bond. In James Bond, I can go put a cool shot in. Now there's an explosion. I have some tropes that I can lean on. With The Keeper, we were inventing something new because there's not a comic book like this.

BET.com: What is the historical or social inspiration for the graphic novel?

TD: I was invited to an event in Detroit and someone drove me around town and gave me a tour and explained what had happened when the auto factory shut down. There were these working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods where all the residents had just left. There are sections of Detroit where you literally could see nature retaking the terrain with plants and trees growing out of the windows of abandoned houses. It struck me that that would be an amazing setting. I'm not actually from Detroit, but as an outsider, that idea that this was a thriving community of people where kids would ride their bikes up and down the street and neighbors would know each other and everyone's just gone... Was really kind of chilling.

I did a little bit of research and there was an incident in history that roughly matches what Aisha's grandmother tells her about when there was a racial attack on Black neighborhoods. No, it wasn't like Tulsa or Rosewood. But people going up and down the street shooting is still terrifying if you are on that street, no matter if it's only a few people or not.

I always try to have a little bit of history. Family and history are two elements that you can almost always find in my work. It's important and so much real-life horror is rooted in personal histories.