Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Home-Grown Monsters

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

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Who says all the fantasies with sword- wielding heroes and heroines have to be in Middle-earth, Westeros, or even our dreams of Africa past—what the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen reminisced as “copper sun or scarlet sea”?…Fantasy stories often feature characters in medieval settings taking on monsters. I figured a young Black woman in 1920s Georgia could be that character too. Even gave her her own sword. The monsters she has to fight are plucked right out of our own history—perhaps made more terrifying because […]

Unfortunately, this one was just meh for me.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

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I actually don’t have too much to say about this one because it didn’t really hit for me. I’m not really sure why, because I’ve liked everything else P. Djèlí Clark has written (Ring Shout was the last thing of his I hadn’t yet read). And I mean, I didn’t not like it, but it’s never really a good sign when your reader is liking your world-building and the alternate history aspects of your story more than your actual story, and more than the characters. […]

“…I hunt monsters. And I got a sword that sings.”

Ring Shout or Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times by P. Djeli Clark

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P. Djeli Clark continues to amaze me with his writing. In this short novel, he leaves behind the “steampunk” and adds plenty of horror to a story set in 1922 Macon, Georgia. As with his previously reviewed works, Clark creates a world where magic is real and plenty of strong women of color stand ready to wield it. Ring Shout or Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times focuses, unsurprisingly, on American racism and white supremacy. I think we all accept that Klansmen are monsters, […]

A masterclass in the novella; body horror and racism collide.

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

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We know that the people who join the Ku Klux Klan are monsters. Average people who act in monstrous, horrible ways. But what if some of the Klan members were actual monsters? Giant, hulking, dog-like beasts that want to consume and destroy Black people? Such is the premise of Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. Maryse, a Black woman, hunts these monsters in Prohibition America with the help of her magical sword infused with the anger, pain, and despair of Black men and women of […]



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