TITLE: Ring Shout
AUTHOR: P. Djèlí Clark
192 pages, Tordotcom, ISBN 9781250767028 (hardcover, e-book, audio)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): IN AMERICA, DEMONS WEAR WHITE HOODS.
In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.
Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan's demons straight to Hell. But something awful's brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up.
Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: P. Djèlí Clark has become an author I just trust will deliver great supernatural alternate-history narratives. The Black God’s Drums, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 and “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” all blew me away with strong characters, intriguing magic systems, recognizable locations (New Orleans and Cairo) and high stakes. I’m very much looking forward to A Master of Djinn (forthcoming in 2021), which continues the adventures of characters from Haunting and “Dead Djinn.” In the meantime, we have Clark’s latest novella, Ring Shout.
In Ring Shout, Clark gives us a new magical alternate-history setting. The year is 1915, the place is Macon, Georgia. The story starts with action: Marlyse Boudreux and her compatriots Chef (the Harlem Hellfighter) and Sadie (she of the foul mouth and the perfect aim) take down a trio of Ku Kluxes – demonic beings in human form who move among humans fomenting hatred and discord. Ring Shout is not a non-stop action ride. There are plenty of quiet, thoughtful scenes interspersed. But this opening sets the tone: very little is at is appears and the threat is everywhere albeit hidden to most eyes.
That threat is about as Lovecraftian as one can get: unknowable beings from another dimension send minions to infiltrate and influence a human cult to bring about their own ascension on the Earthly plane. That the cult in question is the historical Ku Klux Klan is no accident but rather a pitch-perfect rendering of H.P. Lovecraft’s often blatant racism into this fictional world. Clark also takes Lovecraft’s penchant of making black characters nameless stereotypes and applies it to the people in this story that Lovecraft would have identified with. I don’t think we learn the name of a single human Klan member in the entire story, and most of them are described with as little detail as possible. The human Klan members are nameless, featureless tools of the cult leader, Butcher Clyde. We get a lot of detail about him as the main protagonist, but he’s as inhuman as the feral Ku Kluxes he controls on behalf of his masters. Clark also makes it clear that while this threat is supernatural, the supernatural is not responsible for the historical atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan. There are multiple mentions that Butcher Clyde and the Ku Kluxes are simply feeding off an irrational hate for non-whites that the human Klan members already harbor. It’s that hate that allows the Ku Kluxes entry into the human world, and that hate that allows their presence to go unnoticed by the people they are using.
It's apropos that the threat is generically Lovecraftian while the powers that fight against the threat are specifically culled from across the African Diaspora. The magic Maryse and her partners access is drawn from music, from storytelling, from the shared history of slavery and pain. The “ring shout” tradition that gives the book its title in front-and-center in the narrative, more than just a historical allusion. In fact, the chapters are bookended by descriptions of various “shouts” translated from the Gullah dialect into modern English by one of the few characters in the book who is white (which mirrors the way slave and sharecropper folk music was gathered by white musicologists in our world), explicating how the songs are also stories.
Marlyse possesses a magic sword gifted to her by three otherworldly “Aunties” (who, I must admit, reminded me of Mrs. Whatsit, Who and Which from A Wrinkle in Time, but who I’m sure have a much more culturally African basis of which I’m ashamed I’m unaware). But she also carries power of her own, in the memories of her brother and the Brer Rabbit storybook he gave her. Clark takes something white people are aware of via stereotype (in this case, the Walt Disney film Song of the South) and gives the power of those stories back to the people who first told them. The oral storytelling tradition among slaves also introduces the book’s possible secondary threat, the Night Doctors, who here are not just white slaveowners dressed up to scare their slaves into accepting their lot. (This is another part of the slave experience I’m embarrassed to admit I was unaware of before reading Ring Shout.)
The power of storytelling works both ways, and it’s an important story point that the Klan’s power is drawn largely from the way D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (and the books it was adapted from) galvanized disaffected white people into the Klan movement. Clark never downplays the power of words and pictures to motivate people both positively and negatively. In our current climate this is more obvious than ever. It’s not new to the internet age just more quickly spread.
While magic powers the proceedings, it is the characters that pulled me in and kept me invested. Marlyse’s first-person narration is melodic, by turns soothing and energizing, as befits the narrator of a book whose action so hinges on the power of storytelling. Chef and Sadie are equally as important to the story and equally as well-developed because of their proximity to Marlyse. Each brings something different to the narrative in terms of personality, especially in how they handle past trauma and current danger. Elderly Nana Jean, scientist Molly and even the three otherworldly “Aunties” are distinct personalities who bring different ways of viewing the world to the table, and I hope to see more of all of them if Clark ever gives us a sequel to Ring Shout. I also hope we’ll see more of the men in the group as this world develops. There were hints of personality for Michael George, Lester, and Uncle Will, but a novella only has so much space and these characters were not as important to this particular story.
Reading Ring Shout is one of those experiences that operates on multiple levels: it’s an adventure, a horror, an educational, and social commentary all wrapped together, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
I received an e-ARC of this book for review through NetGalley.