2020 has been a heck of a year for horror fiction. The sheer number of masterpieces released this year is really insane. I can think of six titles that in a normal book year would be sue "best of the year" books. It is not just the amazing depths of The Only Good Indian or Genre-crossing of the Loop. There have been several unintentionally well-timed books like Malorie by Malerman which paralleled the mask debate going on in the real world or Tremblay’s Survivor Song which hit mailboxes everywhere as readers were in lockdown at home rationing toilet paper.
So it is also a hell of a time to release a horror novel about the legacy of racism and slavery. Ring Shout hit the streets at the same time as most major cities were in turmoil with protests demanding justice for George Floyd and BreonnaTaylor. History repeats itself and no one knows that better than an actual historian.
P. Deli Clark is the pen-name for the fiction of historian Dexter Gabriel and when you learn this it will all make sense. This is my second book by Clark and each time I thought to myself that the dude does amazing research. The first book I read was Black God’s Drum. That Afrocentric steampunk novella played with history and setting so well. The level of world-building was next level and I wanted hundreds of pages more. I told myself that I was going to follow this author.
I had already planned on reading when Mother Horror Sadie Hartman said it was one of her reads of the year. So I bumped it up to make sure I got it in before the end of the year.
Ring Shout is an amazing piece of work from a single voice. No one else on this planet could write this story and those are the best stories always. Ring Shout is a dark fantasy that is not only in conversation with history but confronting it. This novel is a cutting piece of commentary that comes out a century after it’s events and sadly doesn’t feel distant.
In 1915 after the release of Birth of a Nation, the real-life film that glorified the existence of the Klan. Our main point of view is Maryse Boudreaux who leads a group of resistance fighters who use swords, bombs, and guns to fight back against the demons in white hoods. It is not that much of a leap to imagine the monsters that terrorized the south as hate directed demons from a Lovecraftian universe. No surprise that Clark’s conversation extends to old Howie whose notions of race were less than kind. It is more subtle than Lovecraft Country or Jeminsin’s The City We Become but Ring Shout is clearly in that conversation.
The structure of the story is such that we get the impression that Maryse and her crew have been at it for a while. It is a wonderful fantasy to imagine avenging angels traveling the south looking for revenge and justice fighting the demons in white. At moments it is as fun as it sounds. I didn’t find Ring Shout to be a scary book, while demonic Klans are of course a scary concept, I felt confident in the resistance. That is why I think this book is more Dark Fantasy than anything.
Anyone who reads my commentary on horror knows that I believe in constantly expanding the scope of horror not shrinking it. One of the most interesting aspects of this book to me is the thin line between real history and mythology. In our history as a species very real-life monsters have inspired mythological creatures. To the people of color in the south, the ghosts in white and the demons hiding behind white cloaks were very real.
“They come one night, while we were sleeping. Men, wearing white sheets and hoods. Daddy open the door holding his shotgun, and they start quarreling. My Brother, he say they look like ghosts. But I can see proper. They ain’t men, they are monsters.”
The Klan were real monsters that roamed America, demons that haunt our history and sadly they refuse to die still.
“Reason and law don’t mean much when white folk want their way.”
I wish the above quote only represented history, but sadly when grand juries clear the men who murdered Breonna Taylor, the above statement doesn’t feel like history. Raised in the south Clark grew-up in Houston, but did spend some of his formative years in his parents Trinidad and Tobago. I don’t know how radical or not radical the author is but in all the right ways this is a radical work of fiction.
The best horror and fantasy makes you think and in 180 pages this book makes you consider the Mythology of the Klan, the racism of Lovecraft, the power of fight the mythology as much as the actual monsters, and plenty more. The benefits of this novel being written by an actual historian cannot be undervalued, and in the end, it makes this book a bit of a miracle.
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