‘Ring Shout’ Review: Southern Fantasy Without the White Gaze

There are good books, great books, and then there are the books that transcend both of those categories and should have 300 level college courses dedicated to words written within. Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark is in that last category. I am a fan of the fantasy genre, I’ve read…a lot, so I am always excited when I run into something new. Ring Shout is a lot of things, but old and predictable is not one of them. I mean for starters, how often is Gullah-Geechee Ring Shouting a magic system? Yeah, I know…NEVER. There was a video game I used to love, Mafia 3. In it you played Lincoln Clay, a Black Vietnam veteran who was helping out his family and ended up trying to take over a southern mafia syndicate. The gameplay was good, the characters were fun, the action was great. But that wasn’t why I fell in love with the game. I fell in love with the game because it was historically accurate. It was set in the South in the 60’s. And the absolute Schadenfreudic joy I got at setting a gas station on fire that had a “Whites Only” sign hanging in the front window was off the charts. But the absolute best part, there was a group in the game called the Dixie Mafia and you got to hunt them down and kill them. And it was cathartic, to be able to hunt down and kill Klan members in a video game, it made the game more real, more…personal. There are shades of that same catharsis in Ring Shout, but with next level writing and a cast of characters that I hope and pray find their way to someon…