Book #13 for 2024, which means that, by the end of May, I’ve now read as many books as I read in the whole of 2023… so maybe the great reading plan isn’t working out quite as well as I’d hoped it would, but I’m still doing better than last year? Yay? Anyway, Ring Shout was perhaps a slightly ironic choice after Some of Your Blood; in that book the horror ultimately proves to be unfortunately natural and human, but in this one the human monsters (i.e. the KKK) actually prove to be very much not of this world. Our heroes are a group of “Ku Klux” hunters, particularly our narrator Maryse, working in the American South in 1922, a few years after the moribund Klan was revived by the success of The Birth of a Nation; as the book progresses, it becomes apparent that Griffith’s dubious masterwork will soon have another part to play in bringing something even worse into the world. (I don’t know if Fritzi Kramer at Movies Silently has read this book or not, but with her antipathy towards the Birth I imagine she would approve of it being a plot point in this fashion.) It’s a perfect fit for the Horror May-hem thing on Booktube, which is all about shorter books, but I did feel at times like maybe it could’ve done with being a bit longer; it kind of follows the classical action movie pattern of a big opening and big ending and one other big setpiece, maybe it needed a bit more to flesh it out. Having said which, though, it does generally use its comparative brevity to its advantage, does what it needs to, and comes to an unexpectedly epic climax. There’s not a lot of humour in this book, apart from a semi-running bit with one of the characters using the N-word with a capital “N” vs a lower case “n”, and the last chapter teases a sequel where Maryse and co might have to face off against H.P. Lovecraft (which I would absolutely read if Mr Clark ever feels inclined), but what it does offer is very good indeed. Been meaning to read this for a while, glad I finally did so.
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