This is a phenomenal read. Vivid, imaginative, and extraordinarily powerful. P. Djèlí Clark is one of my favourite authors of all time, and he did not disappoint with this one. This story invokes so many things: the use of music and rhythm as a theme, the recognition of the hate that fuels white supremacy and the ways in which the enemy feeds on it, the celebration of Blackness and Black strength and resilience, the badass female characters that are dominant throughout the story. Such masterful writing within so few pages.

Ring Shout is a powerful novella blending together dark fantasy, horror, and historical fiction. In this story, we are thrown into a world where the Klan and Ku Kluxes are literal monsters. They are beastly and have lots of eyes, mouths, fingers and some even have tentacles. Body horror galore in this story! We have a group of Black hunters with magical weapons on a mission to end their reign and the spread of hate in the white supremacist south. I think it is definitely intentional that Ku Kluxes took on such Lovecraftian guises (given all we know going on there) and P. Djèlí Clark did not hold back one bit. Our female heroines were a total blast to hang out with and I really could read even more stories featuring them. This is literal Black girl magic! This book explores deep rooted racism, all-consuming hate, fear, power, resilience, love, and so much more. There are so many "in your face" and unapologetic scenes and descriptions, but there are also endless lessons under the surface. Clark created a whole new world with this novella, but at the same time, did he really? I had to stop and think about the world quite a few times while reading this magnificent story. Ring Shout is just totally mind blowing in how it's told and how it makes the reader think and feel. You are meant to squirm when reading this. You are meant to read this. Period. 5 stars!

This book was a spectacular use of supernatural alternative history to explore incredibly important topics. Djeli Clark is such a good writer and I think this my favourite of his so far.

This was such a relevant book. I think it would have always been relevant, but considering Americans and the rest of the colonial world re-learning and unlearning their own history with the lens of abuse of power, hatred, and white supremacy, this is the most relevant fiction book I've read in the last few years. This was expertly written, but definitely way too short. My only critique is I'd have loved to read more.

If I read a sharper, more impactful horror novel this year I’ll be surprised.
An intelligent and emotional narrative bound tight by the ties of slavery. Exquisitely rendered scenes of violence and action set pieces dance effortlessly around a painful and difficult narrative.
The characters all have big personalities that give them so much more life than the pages can even contain.
I absolutely loved this book and will shout it to anyone within range.

Please excuse my love of puns as I use this opportunity to shout: THIS BOOK IS AMAZING. PLEASE BUY THIS BOOK IMMEDIATELY. IN FACT, BUY TWO.

Thank you.

It’s not just a pun that makes me want to yell about this book, though. Ring Shout is a magnificent, no-holds-barred triumph of a novel. P. Djèlí Clark hasn’t just knocked it out of the park, he’s knocked down the park and held a dance where the walls used to be.

And of course, a Ring Shout isn’t just a yell. It’s a sacred tradition passed down from slave time, when brief hours not spent in forced labor meant singing and moving in a circle, the songs ranging from celebration to warning to mourning. Ring Shout makes magic both literal and figurative from this ritual of resistance, infusing the novel with deep potency.

Because of its slender page count and its overall importance, I will be discussing the entire book, including parts of the ending. Some spoilers follow.

Ring Shout begins with a survey of the land and the players from a rooftop in Georgia. There’s the KKK marching below in their stupid white robes, only some of them actually are wizards. And up above (morally and physically) is Maryse, resistance fighter and soon-to-be Chosen One in a terrible and fateful battle for the soul of the world.

It’s really great to see a sword-wielding Chosen One be a Black woman in the American South, magic sword and all. Maryse wields a mystical blade forged with the anger of the enslaved, binding the souls of the African leaders who sold their own people, forcing them to repay their sins with blood and magic.

But lest this seem like Maryse and her crew are only bringing a sword to a gun fight, there’s also Chef and Sadie. Sadie is a crack shot, the sniper of the group who gets in a lot of verbal snipes when she’s not shooting Ku Kluxes. Chef handles guns well enough, but she’s the group’s explosives expert, trained in the trenches in WWI, where she fought disguised as a man. She’s also quite the ladykiller (is Clark also a fan of puns? It seems like he might be). And backing them up is Nana Jean, a Gullah elder and master of the Shout, and Maryse’s three mysterious Aunties, who appear to her in visions and charge her with making a choice that will save the world. But what will she save it from?

At first, Maryse thinks she’s going to save it from the KKK, which in this world is both the Klan and the Ku Kluxes. SFF has been rightly criticized for othering BIPOC, repeatedly publishing stories that cast non-white characters as non-human and then reaching the trite conclusion that "others, they're just like us!" Ring Shout turns the trope on its head by othering a mentality and a race: white Klan members can transform into Ku Kluxes, non-human monsters in literal fact as well as in philosophy. Huge pasty beasts with six eyes and conical skulls, the Kluxes are as repulsive as they are frightening. They're tough but stupid; all their power is in brute strength.

Yeah, that checks out.

But evil is ultimately a human trait, and Clark doesn't let us forget that. The Kluxes might be hideous, but they arise from humans and were created by humans. Hate fuels their transformation and spreads it, like an infection. Bad enough, but their hate also draws down extradimensional horrors, beings that feed on hate and wants to raise up a god of hate and hunger on earth.

The herald of this dreadful god calls himself Butcher Clyde and he’s an absolutely terrifying villain, the best I’ve read in recent memory. He's nothing but mouths, there to speak lies and devour everything. His gleaming cleavers are bad enough, but then he goes and uses them not just to fight, but to cut up an abomination and serve it, still living and quivering, to human beings...ugh. It's disgusting, unsettling, and genius. What is hate but devouring the living? What is racism but sustaining yourself on something vile? I shuddered while reading it but take pure delight in telling others about it (a mark of good horror).

There are also the Night Doctors, which prey on my particular fears of a surgical theater of horrors but might not be quite so upsetting to everyone else. But more eerie still is their agent, Dr. Antoine Bisset, who sought them out to see if they could answer his most burning question: what is the source of hate?

Antoine thinks that hate might live in the body, in the humors, like bile or blood. Certainly there is a meta/physical aspect to it in the world of Ring Shout, since hate fuels the transformation of Klans into Ku Kluxes. But as Maryse learns over the course of her journey, hate also lives in the mind, and its fuel is memory.

Like her enemies, Maryse is full of hate. Unlike them, she has plenty of good reasons for it. She’s haunted by an experience so terrible that she keeps it secret even from herself, the sorrow and rage of it still unhealed. How could she have time to heal, when she’s barely had time to breathe? She’s spent her life running and fighting, fighting and hiding. When she’s not taking down Ku Kluxes she’s running moonshine (Prohibition is still in full swing), both endeavors full of dangers that compound her trauma.

Hate is a kind of power. It gets you through; it doesn’t let you despair. But hate eats away the justified just like anyone else. And the big choice the Chosen One has to make is where—or whether—that hate has to stop. Does it stop at justice? Does it stop at vengeance? Does it get to devour Maryse, and the whole world?

The dénouement is a magnificent one-two whammy on the KKK and white sympathizers. Not only are they easily taken in by a monstrous horror, they're not even the main villains. They're too feeble-minded to be Butcher Clyde's real target. Their hate arises from ignorance and cowardice, making it too weak to be worth much on a magical level.

Even their hate isn't worth a damn.

It doesn't make them less dangerous, though. Maryse still has quite the challenge to deal with the Ku Kluxes on top of all the extradimensional horrors, but fortunately, she has help. She has uneasy allies in the Night Doctors, and more importantly, she has her friends and community. Forces from other worlds and monsters from other worlds are no match for a Shout.

Since Lovecraft Country is currently streaming, I think there will be people calling Ring Shout Lovecraftian, too. It's not. Sure, it has the "cosmic" bit of Cosmic Horror down, and yes, there are tentacles, but Ring Shout has reason where Lovecraft only ever has madness. We know why Butcher Clyde has come. His motives are comprehensible, and fighting him in mind and body is a winnable battle. And it matters to him what happens on earth—sure, only insofar as he controls it, but it matters nonetheless.

And it matters what humans do, too. Maryse's choice has meaningful consequences, as do the choices of her friends and enemies. Lovecraft wrote that humans were cosmically meaningless, and indeed that the universe had no greater meaning. Here, real change is possible. Victories mean something.

What exactly is won, though? Lives, yes, and maybe a little bit more insight into their enemies and themselves. But as Maryse is told by her guides, she only really wins the chance for the struggle to continue. The victory, though satisfying, does not put an end to the KKK. It barely even changes hearts and minds: only one white woman gasps out “they’re monsters!” and it’s not even clear that her sudden insight will lead to meaningful change in her attitude or actions.

So yes: the struggle continues.

But Maryse and her community live on. They find joy, power, and healing. The story is about them, from beginning to end. Maryse isn’t choosing not to hate out of an abstract sense of hope or love for her fellow man. She’s doing it for Chef and Sadie, her companions in arms who always have her back. She’s doing it for Michael George, her lover who wants to take her sailing around the world to show her all the things she’s never seen. She’s doing it for Nana Jean and Molly and Emma, who live around her and feed her, teach her, guide her, and need her.

And she’s doing it for herself.

Heroes of SFF and heroes of Civil Rights and Antiracism often end up dead, if they don’t start out that way from the beginning, their lives condensed into hashtags. There is a martyr in this book, but I’ll tell you plainly it’s not Maryse. The main character’s purpose is not to die; it’s to live, in all her complicated, contradictory, stubborn, brave glory. Even if this is the last we hear of Maryse (I hope it’s not), we’ll know she’s out there, mint julep in one hand and sword in the other.

I am never not in awe at how P. Djèlí Clark can create such amazing, complex stories within so few pages. Seriously, there's more story in the first few pages in Ring Shout than I've seen in some 1,000+ pg sagas. How is this possible??? And yet he manages it with literally every story of his that I've read. Ring Shout is, obviously, no exception. It's brilliant, full stop - a seamless blend of history and horror highlighting the ways that hate makes monsters of us all. Sometimes quite literally. Seriously, how does Clark manage to fit so much imagery, symbolism and history into less than 200 pages? HOW?!

Definitely among one of the best books I've read this year. Add it to your TBR right now.

This was short and bloody. Easily could be seen as the start of a series I would gladly read the rest of, mixing history and myth together in a creepy tale more timely than ever.

"Ring Shout " goes into the truly monstrous nature of the Ku Klux Klan to the point of literally making them monsters in the skin of men. But it amplifies that sort of veil by making it so only fee have "the sight" to see the grotesque monsters for they truly are. And so you have this whole world of beings who have a fascination with Black trauma and yanking it out. But then you have Black heroes, monster hunters, armed and charmed and full of the energy of their ancestors. This story brought Black folktales to the forefront, Black Spirituality as a key component, love and this validation of anger that is steeped in Black trauma and love and song and so much more. Not only are they fighting beasts but it doesn't diminish racism as monsters and only monsters can be bad--racism and hate and bias opens you up to the thing that twists and distorts. It's a choice being made--to let that gunk build and chew through you until you beast? Or think of the alternative possibilities beyond that writhing gunk trail? Ultimately systemic white supremacy feeds up the gunk especially to white folks. It's hard to capture all that went down, it's all so big and complicated--but really not when you got the sight for it. Being Black all this sort of settled in my belly, tuggled around at my soul--the woven shouts, the people involved, the elder, the songs the songs the songs, the interconnection of people . Such a good story honestly. My only issue which isnt really an issue was that I had a hard time believing one person was a chosen person in such a racially steeped time...but it was implied there are more champions at the end and maybe more examination on the liminal worlds and who can interact deep in them for advice. Also one person as chosen champion is a common archetype, I know. I'm just glad it's a Black woman this time. And I think one more thing I keep coming back to despite my delight and awe for this book is that because the racialized context is so overt in that the Ku Klux are very literal monsters, a white reader might be fed this subtext that absolves their whiteness of that monstrosity--what I mean is the narrative can run into the trouble of echoing this thought pattern to some white consumers that differentiates their whiteness as "innocent" as oppose to grotesque and monstrous. Further break down of what I mean is it unconsciously can resonate the dichotomy that white people latch onto in conversations of racism and the nuances therein that so long as .they are not blatantly racism they are not the problem, they can disengage from the monstrous. But I can and did see where that nuance was definitely echoed just that the overt monster can drown out the nuance. And that's just a detail that I keep coming back to because I really love this novella and loved the curt cadence of it all and just want audiences that are not Black to notate in their understanding of reading Black Horror which processes out the gruesome embodied trauma and not see this wonderful narrative and not see themselves as a threat as well. Because Clark demonstrates too how systemic and large the structure is and how whiteness is susceptable due to the paradigms shaped in white supremacy. All this to say--I hope there is more to this world to explore.

Ring Shout is an experience. It reads like a surreal fever dream in some parts and alternative history all at once. With elements of horror, dark fantasy, and history, Clark insures that readers of all kinds will enjoy this read.

I loved the characters and myths created within these pages. From DW Griffith as as an important part of the monstrous Ku Kluxes to the manner in which they can be killed, takes monster hunting to an all new level. There were parts that were uncomfortable to read in regards to race and racism and I believe this was absolutely intentional and necessary. Clark shies always from nothing.

This is a quick, important read and I enjoyed the time I spent with this book

Review 5 stars. This is one of the best books that I've read this year and I'll have no hesitation in nominating it for the 2021 Hugo Best Novella. We all know that the members of the KKK are monsters; in this story Clark takes them one step farther. There are human KKK and then there are the Ku Kluxers, monsters from another dimension that are infiltrating our world who feed on hate. They're led by Butcher Clyde and are trying to bring across the Grand Cyclops. Fortunately a group of African American women (and others) stand ready to protect us all. Maryse with her haint-sword is definitely one of the great fantasy heroines of all time. I read this for my 2020 Reading Challenge and the 2021 Hugo nominations. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49247404-ring-shout

I’m not sure what I was expecting but this was NOT it. Intense, engaging, and highly readable, will stay with you for a long time

A clever horror book which uses the history of racism in movies (THE racist film Birth of a Nation in this instance) and sets literal monsters against young black women and their allies who fight them. Maryse the main character is smart and strong. The book uses tidbits of folklore from black culture and folklore woven into a great story. I hope this will be a series.

I almost can't put into words how beautiful, horrifying, disgusting and powerful this book is. Ring Shout weaves together history, folk lore, magic, while having a thought provoking and painful discussion about racism in America and the trauma and grief Black people experience as well as their continual oppression.
Ring Shout is set in the 1920s Macon Georgia following Marsye and her rag tag group who hunt horrifying monsters hidden within the KKK.

Honestly, I don't know what to say, any praise I can muster is insufficient. This is brutal and breathtaking and it would be a disservice to the book and yourself if you don't read it. There is magic and body horror, monsters and action, mystery and gore and joy even in the darkest times. And there is love, so much love between the characters, for each other, for their families for their histories and for their futures. The hate and fear and grief and hope feels like a punch to the gut.

Ring Shout is hands down one of, if not the best fantasy book I've read. I couldn't stop reading yet often I felt so overwhelmed that I couldn't keep reading. Absolutely, a 100% recommend reading Ring Shout!

CW:Aside from the gore and the violence there is a lot of racism and racial violence so be prepared before reading.

4 STARS

IN AMERICA, DEMONS WEAR WHITE HOODS.

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RING SHOUT is something else, let me tell you. I honestly had to sit with it for a few days before I could wrap my head around writing a review. Part fantasy, part horror, RING SHOUT takes a deep and dark look into the history of racism in America (with a twist.)

Although this is a novella, it definitely packs a punch worthy of a full length novel. Fusing fact and fiction into one seamless alternate history, it was often difficult to sort out which was which because of how detailed (and horrifyingly accurate) the writing was. I also loved how strong, independent and yet heavily flawed the main character Marsye was. I was rooting for her the whole time!

Honestly, the only reason that this wasn't a 5 star read for me was that I personally prefer more world building when reading fantasy. I know that this is a novella and there is only so much backstory that can be provided in a shorter story but I was still left with the sense of just wanting a bit...more.

RING SHOUT is a very timely allegory on racism in America and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone.

Also, can we talk about that cover? It is perfection.

Beyond a five star read. It’s impossible to wrap my head around how rich and fully realized the world Clark’s created in such a short book. It’s vivid and horrifying and immersive. A blend of early 20th century Black historical fiction and Eldrich horror ... and that’s hardly scratching the surface. Clark remains a master of his craft. He always manages to rise above the incredibly high expectations his work has already set for him. Just flawless.

An absolutely fantastic historical horror novel! I totally fell in love with Clark’s Cairo series and was thrilled to discover he had a new novella coming out this year. Ring Shout is a historical set horror novel about Black Americans hunting down monsters that spur on the hatred of White supremacists in the South.

Sound fun? It is, but it’s also more than that. A deep look into America’s historical racism and treatment of Black people, Ring Shout gives the reader a lot to think about in terms of historical and personal traumas, as well as a providing number of jumping off points for further research into the actual history behind the story.

I absolutely loved the characters in this book. The three main characters are absolutely stunning — three monster hunting, weapon wielding women who face both supernatural and human enemies every day. I especially adored the foul mouthed Sadie, who was a wonderful addition to the story. These three women have such different backgrounds, but are tied together by their shared traumatic pasts.

The only thing that didn’t quite work for me was — being vague as possible to avoid spoilers — the revelation of the Big Bad. Like with most horror stories, I find that the actual reality of the villain is much less frightening than their actions while cloaked in darkness. While there was a lot that I enjoyed about the ending, that was one thing that stuck with me as not quite clicking. It certainly wasn’t enough to detract from my enjoyment of the story though.

4.5 out of 5 stars

An excellent horror-fantasy with a historical bent. One of those novellas that you wish was longer, just to flesh the world and these characters out even more. With an ending open to a sequel/series, I hope that Clark revisits Maryse and her compatriots.

This was a very atmospheric, vibrant, and intriguing read. Not only are there some pretty great scenes of cosmic/Lovecraftian horror here, there's a lot of commentary on racism and injustice woven into the fantastical elements. The commentary is not subtle at all, but then, it isn't trying to be, and that's perfectly fine, actually; I like that the book just comes out and says what it wants to say without tiptoeing around it all.

I will say I found the worldbuilding just a little bit confusing; I found myself re-reading a lot of passages to understand what was going on. There were a lot of exposition dumps strewn throughout the novella and it was kind of a lot of information to take in all at once. Even by the end I wasn't entirely certain I had completely understood the distinction between the creatures the characters were fighting.

Loved Maryse and her companions, though! Maryse's voice is very distinctive, and the entire novella is written in authentic dialect. The whole book is steeped in a very particular kind of African-American Southern culture that was very rich and immersive.

Overall, this is without a doubt one of my favorite books of 2020. I think my new favorite sub-genre is the specific "Lovecraftian horror, but intentionally and completely rejects/subverts the racist overtones of Lovecraft's writing by using the inter-dimensional monsters as a tool to write a story about fighting for justice and equity" (Also in this vein would be The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin)

As for the story, what's relevant in the US in 1922 is still relevant 98 years later. Clark perfectly blends eldritch horrors into the narrative of the Jim Crow era and the rampant racial injustices that were--and are-- being faced. The characters had incredible depth and even after hardly meeting them I found myself quickly emotionally attached to all of them.

For a quick read, this story packs a large and poignant punch.

Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan/Tor-Forge for the ARC in exchange for a review!

A full review on https://www.armedwithabook.com/will be published closer to the publication date on October 10th.