One of Our Kind

This masterful psychological horror novel from bestselling YA author Nicola Yoon (“Everything, Everything”) brings to bear all the claustrophobia of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives” against the backdrop of systemic racism and police brutality.

Jasmyn Williams, the protago-nist of Yoon’s fourth novel, has just moved with her husband, Kingston, and 6-year-old son, Kamau, to Liberty, a community of McMansions in suburban Los Angeles launched by a billionaire entrepreneur and tailored to affluent Black people.

Jasmyn, who’s pregnant, wants Liberty to be a stable perch from which to support the community beyond its gates — she’s a public defender working with underprivileged clients, and Kingston is a venture capitalist who mentors at-risk youth. But most of Jasmyn’s fellow Liberty residents are oddly skittish about activism or even discussing the case of a 4-year-old Black girl shot by a white police officer.

Even Kingston, whose brother died at the hands of a white cop, is standoffish, retreating to Liberty’s “wellness center” for bespoke spa treatments. Increasingly, Jasmyn feels like an outsider.

As she digs deeper into the workings of Liberty’s leadership and the nature of the treatments offered at the wellness center, she uncovers a horrifying secret that, once revealed, threatens both her life and her sense of self as a Black woman in America.

Though Yoon’s story relates to current conversations around race, its tropes hark back to 1970s pod-people horror, particularly Ira Levin novels like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives.” Those tropes were themselves reworked in films like “Get Out.”

It’s clear early on that this “Black utopia” is not what it seems, but Yoon is skilled at sustaining the tension throughout Jasmyn’s investigations, exposing the ways that Black communities are undermined both internally and externally. It’s an artful page-turning thriller, but constantly mindful that decisions about community and identity can put lives at stake.

It’s a bracing tale of the perils of groupthink and willful ignorance.