The Reformatory

The Reformatory is a horror novel by the American writer Tananarive Due, published in 2023. It mixes horror with historical fiction, and its events are drawn loosely from the Dozier School for Boys, a Florida reform school whose abuses were documented later in the century.

The story is set in 1950 in Gracetown, Florida. Robbie Stephens is twelve and lives with his older sister, Gloria. Their mother has died, their father was falsely accused of attacking a white woman and driven out of town, and the two children are in the care of an elderly neighbour.

After Robbie kicks the son of the town's most powerful landowner, who had been threatening Gloria, he is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys for six months. Robbie can see the dead, which his mother called haints, and the ghosts at the school show him what happened to boys who were sent out to work and never came back.

The Reformatory is a standalone novel. Due uses Robbie's gift to make visible a history the school's staff worked to keep hidden, and the book's tension comes from the difference between what Robbie can see and what he can prove.