Key, Justin C
Entry updated 2 November 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1987- ) US psychiatrist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Roller Coaster" in The Colored Lens for June 2012; his first collection, The World Wasn't Ready for You (coll 2023) ambitiously conveys a sense of modern America through the use of Horror in SF tropes to anatomize and locate Black experience in this "modern" world, including a deft use of Doppelgangers, Identity traps, Telepathy. A deadpan you-think-I'm-kidding Satirical point of view is evident throughout.
Key's first novel, The Hospital at the End of the World (2026), set in an AI-dominated Near-Future world where hospitals and medical treatment in general (see Medicine) have been inimically automated; the student-doctor protagonist is attracted to the one remaining human-run hospital, in New Orleans, in which he enrols. The narrative becomes complicated, which may blur the underlying plausibility of its premise. [JC]
Justin Carlyle Key
born Washington, District of Columbia: 18 June 1987
works
- The Hospital at the End of the World (New York: Harper, 2026) [hb/Robin Bilardello]
collections and stories
- The Perfection of Theresa Watkins (New York: Tor.com, 2020) [story: ebook: first published 23 September 2020 Tor.com: na/Eli Minaya]
- Spider King (no place given: Serial Box, 2021) [novella: ebook: na/uncredited]
- The World Wasn't Ready for You (New York: Harper, 2023) [coll: hb/Kit Schluter]
links
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