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A review by thesaltiestlibrarian
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
adventurous
challenging
dark
hopeful
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
RTC
Y'know. Thanksgiving stuff. I'll get to this later this week.
***
Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. The views included herein are mine alone and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.
Talk about celebrating blackness!
I started reading Clark this year when I picked up his novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015. That alone was flavor enough to get me hooked. I mean, come on. Hunting spirits in 1920s suffrage-era Steampunk Cairo? Every box is checked. Lately I’ve been reflecting on the use of cosmic horror to empower and tell the stories from marginalized people, and while I’ve yet to see it explore disability (note to self: write that), I LOVE that authors are using it to explore race!
Our story starts with Maryse and her two best friends, Chef and Sadie, scoping out some Ku Klux Klan members and baiting monsters with an animal carcass behind the building they’re stationed on. We’re thrown into the story real quick when the monsters--Ku Kluxes--get blown up by Chef, and one of them gets real mad.
Welcome to 1920s Georgia, where The Birth of a Nation has successfully brainwashed a bunch of angry white southerners into funneling their hatred towards brown folk into a terrorist organization: the Ku Klux Klan. But little do they know that creatures called Ku Kluxes can take over their bodies and worse, appear to regular people as men themselves. But Maryse isn’t regular, far from it. She can see Ku Kluxes plain as day and in battle, summons an ethereal sword to fight them. A sword powered by the trials and righteous anger of black people all the way back to the beginning of the slave days in Africa.
Hold me back, because that’s super frigging cool and I can’t get over it.
Anyway, back to the summary. When a new butcher shop opens and a strange man summons Maryse there in a dream, the stakes reach new heights and the literal fate of the world rests in her hands. Well, her and her Gullah grandma, a spiritual woman who summons light magic and bottles it.
Not only was the action unstoppable and the characters both badass and relatable, the culture of a little-known South Carolina community of black people simply gushes from these pages. The Gullah community has such representation here, and it’s amazing to me how much I still don’t know and have to learn about the little nooks in our vast country. I didn’t quite know what a juke joint was before reading this, and I had seen Shouts before in media and books, but nothing expounded upon and represented like in Ring Shout. There’s even folklore in here I’ve never heard of before, which is impressive considering how much I take in about that kind of stuff on the daily!
The Night Doctors were eerie and silent and one of my favorite parts of this book. Dr. Bisset sent goosebumps down my spine. That’s hard to do! I’m not easily moved or given the creeps. He and the Night Doctors did both.
Like I mentioned earlier, the action in here is haunting and captivating and brutal. Maryse coming to terms with her own hate and fueling her sword with righteous indignity instead gave me chills. And that final confrontation? Insane. (But I’ll leave that for you to read for yourself and find out.) Loved that quantum physics come into play here too.
The only reason I gave this book four stars instead of five is because I felt like we could have used more involvement from the Shouts and Nana Jean being a total badass a bit more often.
I’ve never found Lovecraft to be scary or particularly horrific. For the so-called father of cosmic horror, he was only “meh” at it. Writers like P. Djeli Clark have taken the notches up to eleven, and I could feel the insignificance of being a human in this cold universe. On the back end of that, though, there’s the love and comfort of community and family. As much as we are tiny and alone in this void and vacuum, we’re certainly not abandoned. And that more than any other theme shines in Ring Shout.
Y'know. Thanksgiving stuff. I'll get to this later this week.
***
Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. The views included herein are mine alone and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.
Talk about celebrating blackness!
I started reading Clark this year when I picked up his novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015. That alone was flavor enough to get me hooked. I mean, come on. Hunting spirits in 1920s suffrage-era Steampunk Cairo? Every box is checked. Lately I’ve been reflecting on the use of cosmic horror to empower and tell the stories from marginalized people, and while I’ve yet to see it explore disability (note to self: write that), I LOVE that authors are using it to explore race!
Our story starts with Maryse and her two best friends, Chef and Sadie, scoping out some Ku Klux Klan members and baiting monsters with an animal carcass behind the building they’re stationed on. We’re thrown into the story real quick when the monsters--Ku Kluxes--get blown up by Chef, and one of them gets real mad.
Welcome to 1920s Georgia, where The Birth of a Nation has successfully brainwashed a bunch of angry white southerners into funneling their hatred towards brown folk into a terrorist organization: the Ku Klux Klan. But little do they know that creatures called Ku Kluxes can take over their bodies and worse, appear to regular people as men themselves. But Maryse isn’t regular, far from it. She can see Ku Kluxes plain as day and in battle, summons an ethereal sword to fight them. A sword powered by the trials and righteous anger of black people all the way back to the beginning of the slave days in Africa.
Hold me back, because that’s super frigging cool and I can’t get over it.
Anyway, back to the summary. When a new butcher shop opens and a strange man summons Maryse there in a dream, the stakes reach new heights and the literal fate of the world rests in her hands. Well, her and her Gullah grandma, a spiritual woman who summons light magic and bottles it.
Not only was the action unstoppable and the characters both badass and relatable, the culture of a little-known South Carolina community of black people simply gushes from these pages. The Gullah community has such representation here, and it’s amazing to me how much I still don’t know and have to learn about the little nooks in our vast country. I didn’t quite know what a juke joint was before reading this, and I had seen Shouts before in media and books, but nothing expounded upon and represented like in Ring Shout. There’s even folklore in here I’ve never heard of before, which is impressive considering how much I take in about that kind of stuff on the daily!
The Night Doctors were eerie and silent and one of my favorite parts of this book. Dr. Bisset sent goosebumps down my spine. That’s hard to do! I’m not easily moved or given the creeps. He and the Night Doctors did both.
Like I mentioned earlier, the action in here is haunting and captivating and brutal. Maryse coming to terms with her own hate and fueling her sword with righteous indignity instead gave me chills. And that final confrontation? Insane. (But I’ll leave that for you to read for yourself and find out.) Loved that quantum physics come into play here too.
The only reason I gave this book four stars instead of five is because I felt like we could have used more involvement from the Shouts and Nana Jean being a total badass a bit more often.
I’ve never found Lovecraft to be scary or particularly horrific. For the so-called father of cosmic horror, he was only “meh” at it. Writers like P. Djeli Clark have taken the notches up to eleven, and I could feel the insignificance of being a human in this cold universe. On the back end of that, though, there’s the love and comfort of community and family. As much as we are tiny and alone in this void and vacuum, we’re certainly not abandoned. And that more than any other theme shines in Ring Shout.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Death, Hate crime, and Racism
Moderate: Blood, Kidnapping, and Slavery
Minor: Animal death