Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark
It’s 1922 in Macon, Georgia, and the Ku Klux Klan is on the march. Bolstered by the grotesquely racist film Birth of a Nation, the rejuvenated Klan claims millions of followers throughout the United States.
Their power runs deep, especially in the South. Worse, many members of the group are literal monsters – demonic beasts from another dimension who feed on human meat.
Ring Shout is a novella by P. Djeli Clark. Its protagonists are a trio of Black women warriors who battle the Klan. The lead character is Maryse Boudreaux, a 25-year-old who wields a magic sword. She lost her family to racist violence when she was a kid.
Maryse has “the sight”, which allows her to know which members of the KKK are demons. She also communicates with friendly spirits who give her advice.
She is joined by Sadie, a rifle-toting and conspiracy-minded demon hunter who annoys Maryse by constantly using the N-word. The third in the trio is Chef, a gay World War I vet who is a skilled bomb maker. They have an older mentor, Nana Jean, a woman who is a member of the Gullah culture. She helped mentor Maryse after she became orphaned.
This is a colorful group, and they have a great repartee with each other. It’s impressive that a book as short as this (less than 200 pages) has such well drawn characters.
They also have a White ally, Emma, a Jewish socialist who wants to take down the Klan. She is somewhat similar to the historical figure Emma Goldman, but I don’t know if Clark intended this.
Ring shouts are African religious rituals that involve singing, stomping, and clapping. They are still performed in contemporary times by the Gullah culture. This book also features a storyline related to legends (based on real historical accounts of cadaver snatching) of evil supernatural entities called Night Doctors, boogeymen who steal and dissect Black peoples’ corpses.
This book was educational for me. I had never heard of ring shouts, night doctors, or the Gullah culture.
Ring Shout has some pacing issues. It features lots of historical exposition in the middle, which bogs down the pacing, but the book rallies for a strong and memorable conclusion. More on that in a moment.
Novellas are challenging to write. That’s why short stories and novels are far more common (novellas can also be difficult to market/sell).
Clark could have chopped this book into an action-packed short story, or added more background and nurtured it into a full length novel. As a novella, it’s still really good, but the length and pacing seem somehow both too short/slow and too long/fast.
The dialect is challenging at times. The characters use what I assume to be period-accurate language for their time and place, which is a mix between American English, Southern slang, Creole, and African American vernacular. I was able to understand what the characters were saying the vast majority of the time, and I think the same will be true for most readers.
The only major exception is when Nana Jean is speaking Gullah. No effort is made to translate what she’s saying. That’s fine. It’s only a tiny portion of the novella’s dialogue. Ring Shout is clearly not intended to appeal to a broad mainstream audience anyway. Clark is a history professor, so I’m sure he wanted this stuff to be accurate as possible.
But back to the ending. Maryse is confronted by fear, grief, and difficult choices during the novel’s climax, when the demons’ true intentions are made clear. The final battle delivers a climactic and satisfying send off to the story.
Clark appears to be arguing that hate, even when justified, is still corrosive. Is the hatred that Maryse and her allies feel for their oppressors just as bad as the KKK’s hatred for them? A controversial perspective, but Clark (who is African American) seems to think so.
Rating
Ring Shout is an imaginative mix of dark fantasy, horror, real 1920s events, and alternate history. The pacing could be better, but the characters are well drawn and the ending is compelling. Recommended especially for people who enjoyed the movie Sinners (my review here).
Rating from 1 (avoid at all costs) to 10 (masterpiece): 8
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