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Mar. 27th, 2021 04:26 pmThe Haunting of Tram Car 015 put P. Djéli Clark on my auto-buy list; his latest novella, Ring Shout, is a very different book in tone and feel but definitely has some of the same strengths.
Ring Shout is set in the 1920s, in an alternate universe in which the KKK has been infiltrated by squirmy cosmic horrors who feed off hate and bad vibes. The narrator and protagonist, Maryse, is part of the actively demon-slaying arm of a larger anti-cosmic-horror coalition -- Gullah-led and mostly Black and Native, with one or two Jewish communists mixed in -- that has just received bad news: the next public screening of Birth of a Nation is going to serve as a ritual to let a whole lot more horrors into the universe, and our heroes just do not have the numbers or the clout to fight that many literal monsters of white supremacy unless they go looking for some very weird allies.
This novella is very much a story about Chosen Ones and magic swords and facing one's inner demons as a rest stop on the way to killing some external demons, which is very fun and extremely cinematic but less personally compelling to me than the beleaguered bureaucrats in Tram Car 015. That said, Clark continues to be extremely good at both grounding a story in a very specific place and time, and showing all the complexities of that place and time with their contrasts and jagged edges. People who are broadly on the same side have an incredibly broad range of opinions about the things they're experiencing and what they mean for the future, and it makes his books feel incredibly real and vibrant. The apparently effortless way he populates the backgrounds of his worlds with vivid and complicated detail without detracting from the forward momentum of the story is especially impressive to me given that both Ring Shout and Tram Car are novellas -- I truly cannot wait to see what he'll do in the novel he has out later this year.
Ring Shout is set in the 1920s, in an alternate universe in which the KKK has been infiltrated by squirmy cosmic horrors who feed off hate and bad vibes. The narrator and protagonist, Maryse, is part of the actively demon-slaying arm of a larger anti-cosmic-horror coalition -- Gullah-led and mostly Black and Native, with one or two Jewish communists mixed in -- that has just received bad news: the next public screening of Birth of a Nation is going to serve as a ritual to let a whole lot more horrors into the universe, and our heroes just do not have the numbers or the clout to fight that many literal monsters of white supremacy unless they go looking for some very weird allies.
This novella is very much a story about Chosen Ones and magic swords and facing one's inner demons as a rest stop on the way to killing some external demons, which is very fun and extremely cinematic but less personally compelling to me than the beleaguered bureaucrats in Tram Car 015. That said, Clark continues to be extremely good at both grounding a story in a very specific place and time, and showing all the complexities of that place and time with their contrasts and jagged edges. People who are broadly on the same side have an incredibly broad range of opinions about the things they're experiencing and what they mean for the future, and it makes his books feel incredibly real and vibrant. The apparently effortless way he populates the backgrounds of his worlds with vivid and complicated detail without detracting from the forward momentum of the story is especially impressive to me given that both Ring Shout and Tram Car are novellas -- I truly cannot wait to see what he'll do in the novel he has out later this year.
