Hunting monsters in 1922 Georgia.

P. Djèlí Clark's Ring Shout.

Sep 19, 2021

Hi, friends.

It’s a beautiful sunny Sunday & here I am, still reading horror stories.

I’m also having a little bit of a fight with my brain. It always wants to try to schedule everything & MAKE PLANS, but the thing that I’m really ENJOYING about writing these newsletters is that it feels like a throwback to first engaging with the online book world a million years ago. Before it turned into an offshoot of my job; when it was purely about connecting with people who had similar interests & curiosities.

And for me, some of the result of the Pandemic Rerack—that’s our household term for all of the reevaluating and reconsidering of priorities that we’ve found ourselves doing over the last going-on two years—is that I’ve realized that I still love those conversations and chatter, but I don’t love A) when it feels like a job, and B) when it’s on regular social media platforms, where there’s just such a firehose of other garbage.

I’m not sure how much sense that makes.

But, anyway, newsletter. And for now, my brain will just have to deal with the fact that it’s a newsletter that will go out on whatever random day that I feel like sending it out, including on a sunny Sunday morning.

It’s 1922, in Macon, Georgia, and Maryse Boudreaux is hunting monsters:

They easy enough to recognize. One missing an arm. The other, possibly the biggest Ku Klux I ever seen, got a dent in its pale white chest. The two sniff at the air, searching. Ku Kluxes don’t have good eyesight, even though they got six. But they can smell better than the best hound. It takes two heartbeats for them fix on me. Then they’re galloping on all fours, snarling and marking me as prey.
But like I said already, I hunt monsters.
And I got a sword that sings.

Ring Shout had me from the first page, but when I hit the above passage on page 23, it HAD ME, HAD ME. At that moment, it suddenly became one of those glorious reading experiences where it doesn’t feel like I’m looking at text on a page—it feels like I’m watching a movie or listening to someone tell me a story.

Or, somehow, because of the strength of Maryse’s voice, both.

It’s magic.

There’s pain here, and horror. There are fantastically disgusting descriptions of wriggling meat and creatures that just shouldn’t be. It shows brutality and inhumanity and unthinking hatred; it shows people choosing, of their own volition, to embrace all of those things.

But there’s also humor and hope and love and warmth and friendship and family and connection and kindness. There are action sequences that made my heart swell AND made me want to cry, because they showed one tiny person continuing, against all odds, to push against everything that is bad, because it was the right thing to do.

And ultimately, those scenes made me weepy because, when the camera pulled back, that one tiny person wasn’t facing monsters all alone—her friends and loved ones and allies were with her.

In the simplest terms, Ring Shout has the same central story as Star Wars. When you strip it all down, it’s about a person having to make a choice between power and people.

But Ring Shout is a whole lot more explicit about the stakes. As the years have gone on—and obviously with some exceptions—to me, the central Star Wars movies have felt more and more like a family drama, and less and less like a story about, you know, events and choices and power structures that affect a whole universe of people.

It was so incredible to me how Ring Shout, a book that has fewer than 200 pages, does both things so beautifully: it deals with Maryse’s very personal pain, but it also shows how her life and experience is part of a much bigger pattern. And it acknowledges that it’s a pattern that predates her, and that will continue on after her:

“And if I don’t accept this offer, then we win? No more Ku Kluxes?”
“If you don’t accept,” Auntie Ondine answers, “there is the chance to continue the struggle. The hope at one day seeing victory. No more.”
That don’t seem fair.

I don’t want to end on a downer note here, because again, while it’s a dark, scary, horrifying (and again, sometimes truly gross) read, there is so, so much warmth in this book. So much humor. So much hope.

(And it’s exciting! Again, those action sequences!! And, as a horror fan, some of the more gruesome bits—I’m looking at you, Butcher Clyde—were delightfully revolting.)

(AND! Maryse goes back, again and again, to the folktales that she and her brother used to share—and there are others referenced here and there by other characters throughout—and I’m familiar with some, but not all, so I am VERY excited about the related rabbithole I’ll be diving down shortly.)

Bookshelves of Doom

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