Ring Shout by P. Djéli Clark
I have a dim memory from a high school English class, reading Edgar Allen Poe and learning the word phantasmagoria. I had to Google it before writing this review, to make sure I correctly remembered the definition: a surreal, nightmare-like fantasy story filled with menacing, shifting apparitions. Or something like that. A small literary niche occupied by the likes of Poe, H.G. Wells and Jorge Luis Borges.
I’d say phantasmagoria is an apt word to describe P. Djéli Clark’s new novella, Ring Shout, as well as the year in which it was published: 2020. While Clark’s story is set in the 1920s, it feels infused with the anger, tension and urgency of now. Or perhaps a better way to say it: the anger, tension and urgency of the 1920’s racial crisis in America have been carried forward into our time.
Clark’s strange and disconcerting tale takes place in an (only slightly) alternative universe, centered in Macon, Georgia. While slavery has been abolished, Jim Crow has risen to take its place. The Ku Klux Klan and its brutal brand of white supremacy are spreading like a virus across the country, as white people of all classes struggle to keep Black people in their “proper place” at the bottom of the social order. But in Clark’s version of America, there’s a dark, supernatural force at work behind the scenes. Through screenings of the infamous racist film, The Birth of a Nation, ordinary human Klan members are transformed into shape-shifting demons with superhuman strength called Ku Kluxes. Led by a sinister Macon businessman named Butcher Joe, the Klan’s ranks swell as it awaits the arrival of a supreme power called The Grand Cyclops.
Enter Clark’s heroines: three Black women named Maryse, Sadie and Chef. Sadie is a sharpshooting sniper armed with a Winchester and a mouthful curses for every Ku Klux she guns down. Chef is a World War I veteran with a talent for building bombs. Maryse is the trio’s leader and the story’s narrator, a field strategist in a guerrilla war against white supremacy, planning fatal attacks on Klu Kluxes. They find their community in a disparate group of revolutionaries, including a group of elderly religious devotees called ring shouters who use song and movement to infuse the anti-Klan insurgency with the power of God.
Ring Shout is short, violent and visceral. It pulls no punches, beginning with a horrifying scene of Ku Kluxes feasting on a dead dog and never letting up for the next 180 pages, where Clark makes it clear that the future for Maryse and her fellow warriors will continue to be filled with violence.
In my reading of this book, it seems that Clark’s main focus is on the adaptive, contagious role that hatred plays in racism. Slavery was abolished, but hatred didn’t go away. In fact, it festered and grew and reared its head in a powerful new form. It grew even stronger as ordinary, “good white people” fed into it, resulting in town squares filled with picnicking families watching Black people lynched from trees. That’s about as phantasmagorical as it gets, but it really happened. At the conclusion, as Maryse surveys a battle-field littered with demon corpses and slain comrades, Clark seems to be asking, in the tradition of George Orwell, “This might be a sci-fi story but it’s not very far from reality at all, is it?”
Slavery was abolished, but hatred didn’t go away. In fact, it festered and grew and reared its head in a powerful new form.
A New York Times Editor’s Choice Pick
A Booklist Editor’s Choice Pick
A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist
Named a Best of 2020 Pick for NPR Library Journal Book Riot LitReactor Bustle
ISBN:9781250767028
Binding:Hardcover
Publication date:10/13/2020
Publisher: TORCOM
Pages:192
Author:P. Djèlí Clark
