In his cover blurb, Stephen Graham Jones calls The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, “The Book of the Decade,” and I enthusiastically agree. I can’t remember the last time a novel hit me this viscerally. I finished it a couple of nights ago, and haven’t stopped thinking about it or talking about it to anyone who would listen. No matter how good you’ve heard it is (and the reviews have been universally superlative), The Reformatory is even better.

The novel is set in the Jim Crown south, in the fictional small town of Gracetown, Florida, in 1950. While defending his older sister, Gloria, 12 year old Robbie kicks the son of the largest white landowner in town, and because he’s black, he’s sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a place with an evil reputation. As Robbie struggles to survive the horrors of the reformatory, Gloria does her best to navigate an unjust system to get him released before it’s too late.

If my description sounds like The Reformatory is a straight-up historical novel, think again. This is very much a horror novel. The funny thing is, while ghosts (called haints in the book) play a large part in the story, the true horrors in the novel, the true evil that permeates virtually every page, is very much human. The white racists in power, from judges, to police, to small town thugs, to the human monsters who run the Gracetown School for Boys, they haunt this book more than any ghost.

Due, always a wonderful writer, has outdone herself. This is a riveting, heart-stopping novel. There are moments when she ratchets up the tension to an unimaginable degree. One scene in particular, when Gloria and another family member are stopped in their car by local law enforcement, reminded me the opening of Inglorious Basterds, in the level of anxiety and stress in causes the reader. I needed to go for a little walk after that.

The non-surprising, but no less sad, thing that makes The Reformatory truly gut-wrenching is that the reformatory is based on a real, infamous place—the Dozier School for Boys. In fact, the discovery that one of Due’s relatives died at Dozier was instrumental in this book eventually being written.

Don’t miss The Reformatory. It’s that good.