Ring Shout

Ring Shout, or, Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times is a dark historical fantasy novella by the American writer P. Djeli Clark, published in hardcover by Tor.com Publishing on 13 October 2020. It is set in Georgia in 1915 and follows Maryse Boudreaux, who hunts Klansmen.

The premise is that the film The Birth of a Nation worked as a spell as well as a story, swelling the Klan's ranks and drawing something hungry into the people who joined it. Maryse and her companions, a woman who cooks and a veteran who fights, go after the monsters and the men behind them, and the novella follows the hunt towards the figure directing both.

Clark folds Gullah traditions into the horror and keeps the historical setting precise, so the monsters and the racial violence of the period are the same problem rather than two. The novella was widely reviewed and awarded, and it is one of the best-known recent examples of southern gothic historical fantasy, with its short length keeping the hunt close and fast.