I will start at the beginning with the "Episodes" as McCauley calls them - and what’s not to love, they entice you into the book and once there, you cannot escape. They are:
Online
The Girl in the Bomba Dress
Afro Otaku
For August Wilson and Romare Bearden
The Text Message
OAV: Neon Steel
Viper/Sweet
Smoke Break
Romeo Must Die (Again)
Batman in Pittsburgh
The Con
Commercial Break: Writing Fiction
OAV: The Vampires of Pittsburgh
Commercial Break: The Day the Salt Ran Out in the City
Respect the Chair
Epilogue: Eat N’ Park
Neon Steel is an energetic, genre-melding collection that feels at once like a teenager's mixtape, a manga, and a missive to Pittsburgh. Jennifer Maritza McCauley blends magical realism, pop culture, and sharp storytelling in a book that vibrates with life.
All the "Episodes" are linked, despite their odd names. Neon Steel is a glorious celebration of the often-overlooked Black "nerd culture," Afro-Latina identity, and the process of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1990s and early 2000s. It follows anime fans, vampires, indie rappers, robots, and pleasure-mongers as they move through their neighbourhoods, their friendships, and the bewitching otherworld reverberating beneath real-world stuff.
What makes Neon Steel remarkable is each Episode's fluidity. We are introduced to a secret coven of vampires hiding out in steel mills; we see an explosion into fireballs when a character’s rage becomes supernatural. These shifts cleverly show how fandom, imagination, and cultural hybridity shape our identity. McCauley moves fluently between realism and fantasy, often within one paragraph, creating stories that are dynamic and always unpredictable.
Neon Steel is bold and inventive, and it evokes a genuine, deeply felt response in the reader. It doesn’t fit with any one genre. The book uses magical realism and pop-culture tropes to chart the coming-of-age journey involving its central protagonist, Adrienne, alongside a cast of outsiders seeking identity and connection.
We discover the underground world of Afro Otaku, and we see a reinterpretation of The Terminator as a manga narrative featuring a purple-haired robot. The characters determine the core of the book: young people negotiating in-betweenness, racial, cultural, social, or personal. McCauley’s central figures are lifelike, intense and often flawed; they are real people searching for something. Themselves? Another world? Otherness? Pittsburgh is always there as a backdrop, yet also as a character: uncompromising, neon-lit, of course, and full of secret places and other worlds.
What makes the collection uniquely compelling is its clear structural framing. McCauley models the narrative after a season of classic Japanese anime, organizing the linked stories like television episodes complete with commercial breaks, interstitial sketches, and standalone OVA-style interludes.
At its core, Neon Steel analyses the intersection of Black, Afro-Latina and Asian pop-culture influences, delving deeply into the subcultures of youth who find community in spaces where they are historically underrepresented: anime fandoms, manga, cosplay, comic books, and arcades. Underneath the vibrant pop-culture parodies and speculative elements lies a tender portrait of youth, alienation, and the emotional safety found in chosen families. It’s a celebration of fandom, identity, and the communities we build when the world doesn’t quite know what to do with us. For readers who love hybrid fiction, magical realism, or stories that centre Black and Afro Latina nerd culture, this is an exceptional work from one of today's most exciting writers. McCauley has captured the nostalgia of night-time anime blocks and dial-up internet with a distinct, unapologetic voice. Ultimately, Neon Steel acts as an energetic, intensely personal, and stylish celebration of individual discovery for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.
Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.
You can read more about Neon Steel by Jennifer Maritza McCauley on Creative Writing at Leicester here.
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