Nadia

NadiaThis novella is something of a masterpiece of cosmic horror and folk horror. Set in 1925 in Macon, Georgia, Ring Shout pits a cast of badass Black women against the KKK and the other, even more dangerous occult horrors that lurk among them. In this imagining of the American south, the Klan has used an arcane summoning to invite eldritch entities to join their ranks, and the incendiary film the Birth of a Nation was their biggest conjuring. The protagonist Maryse is part of a team of monster hunters defending folks from these entities, called Ku Kluxes. The rest of their team includes: Sadie Watkins, a country-born sharpshooter; Cordelia Lawrence, a queer woman who passed as a man in order to serve with the Harlem Hellfighters in the First World War; Molly, a scientist whose family was enslaved by the Choctaw, and her two Afro-Indigenous assistants Emma Krauss, a German Jewish widow who has an anthropological interest in the music of the African diaspora and Nana Jean, a Gullah-Geechee root conjurer, bootlegger, and the brains behind the operation Clark blends dark fantasy, cosmic horror, and folk horror inspired by African diasporic cultures into a clever, creepy, and very fun take on the good-guys-vs-evil-monsters premise. It reads like the Dunwich Horror, except instead of a dismal vision of Massachusetts beset by fish people (who represent immigrants, because Lovecraft was a dick), you have a vibrant vision of 1925 Macon full of both racist oppression and Black resilience, and the monsters represent the hate that eats away at a racist's soul. And here I'll make a recommendation that I've never made before: THIS IS A BOOK BEST ENJOYED AS AN AUDIOBOOK. Channie Waites' performance is incredible. It's dynamic and truly does justice to the specific accents, colloquialisms, and the Gullah dialect that make the book feel so authentic.

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