Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

​   I’m a fan of P. Djèlí Clark. I’ve read all of his tor.com published books thus far and enjoyed them. Not evenly, but considerably. This one, oddly billed as novella, (at 172 pages it’s definitely on the longer side of that), is more alongside his debut than his Dead Djinn Universe stories. Which is to say it is much more racially charged and Afrocentric.
    Understandably so, not only if there a huge market for that right now, but also it is the author’s own heritage and his field of interest in real life, and if anyone can write a wildly entertaining morality tale on racism, it’s Clark.
     His recipe is taking human monsters of the whitehooded variety and turning them into literal ones and then throwing in some almost cosmic horror like elements and some magical fantasy like elements and a trio of kickass female warriors and the end result is pretty tasty. It’s seasoned with real life tragic elements of black history and some Gullah dialogue and mythology of the old continent. A lot, really, considering the page count restrictions, but Clark makes it work. He even manages to do the moral lesson (on the evils of hatred) right, not too heavy not too light, just right. There are even tentacles here, woohoo. So, overall, I’d say this book is a success.
      Did I enjoy it as much as I do his Dead Djinn stories…no, not really. Much like his debut, it didn’t quite work the same way for me. It’s too racially charged, too message oriented, for pure storytelling immersion. But if one was after a racially charged, message oriented story wrapped in speculative genre mash up…this is probably as close as one would get. Quick read too.