Ring Shout

Last week I wrote about reading Charlaine Harris' Gunnie Rose books. I was thinking about what other books I would compare them to. Although they're not really that urban (perhaps with the exception of San Diego-set The Russian Cage), I think they're similar in tone to other urban fantasies, Seanan McGuire's October Daye and Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson series, for example.

The alt-history and Old West vibes call to mind Cherie Priest. Also Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory books. It seems like there's been an increase in contemporary Westerns and alt-Westerns--in part, I think, combatting a historic whitewashing of the Western genre and depicting a more diverse and often more accurate landscape. Karen Memory, for example, brings in as a character Bass Reeves, the first black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River.

One recent alternate history standout is Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. It's one of Tor's novellas, and it packs it  powerful punch in under 200 pages. It features a sharpshooting female protagonist, Maryse Boudreaux, and her crew of women fighters, combatting the literally monstrous ku kluxes, a supernatural threat embedded within the Klan. WWI is over and veterans have returned to a country still marred by racial violence, with Birth of a Nation playing as a recruitment message for the KKK. Maryse and her crew work with the community effort led by Gullah wisewoman Nana Jean to harness the power of the ring shout to combat the power of the kluxes.

The action of Ring Shout is dense, but it introduces a compelling cast, several action sequences, harrowing encounters with a despicable villain, spiritual journeying, moral dilemmas, dubious bargains, and a climactic mountain-top battle with worldwide stakes. It draws heavily on horror (much more so than I prefer, although it's appropriate to the subject matter; while I'm not very well versed in Lovecraft or the contemporary responses to his mythos, I'm sure there are parallels with some of them, likely including Lovecraft Country) and is deeply steeped in African and African American traditions.

Sidenote: Katherine Hazzard-Donald's Mojo Workin' gives an interesting nonfiction perspective on the role of ring shout in "the old African American hoodoo system," along with many other aspects of hoodoo.