“The premise was just like, ‘Wait, what now?’” Ms. Locke said. “For me, as a black writer, I have to be like, ‘What’s Ben trying to do here?’” Then she got sucked into the story and was “blown away,” she said.

“There’s always this chatter about who gets to tell which stories, and I’m so grateful that he did not let his choice to have a black protagonist scare him away from the project, because this is everybody’s history,” she said.

“Underground Airlines” is landing in a thicket of fictional works about slavery and its lingering legacy in America. Last month, Alfred A. Knopf released Yaa Gyasi’s ambitious debut novel, “Homegoing,” a visceral story about the effect of slavery on two half sisters and generations of their descendants. Counterpoint recently published Natashia Deon’s debut novel, “Grace,” which is narrated by the ghost of a former slave. And this fall, Doubleday will publish Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” about a slave named Cora; she escapes from a Georgia plantation and flees north via an Underground Railroad that is not just a metaphorical alliance, but also a real subterranean network of tunnels and stations connected by a rickety train.

All of these novels wrestle with the ways that slavery has shaped the country. But Mr. Winters’s approach takes the theme to a shocking conclusion.

“He’s taking a direct whack at one of the main critical things that’s happening in this country right now,” said Lev Grossman, a book critic and author of the fantasy series “The Magicians.” “This is a white writer going after questions of what it’s like to be black in America. It’s a fearless thing to do.”

Mr. Winters, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children, stumbled into fiction writing by accident. He grew up in Maryland in a middle-class Jewish family and played bass in a punk band in his youth. After college, he wrote plays and musical comedies.

To expand his modest income — “from zero to something,” he said wryly — he started writing parody books on commission for the Philadelphia publisher Quirk Books. One of his assignments was “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters,” which imported giant lobsters and man-eating jellyfish into Jane Austen’s Regency romance. Though it was clearly a spoof, Mr. Winters took the job seriously, and closely studied Austen’s plotting and character development.