Maryse, a Black woman with a mystical eye and a magical sword, is hunting down and killing those Ku Kluxes with a handful of other women. They don’t stay still for nothing-wobbling and twisting about, like reflections in those funny mirrors at carnivals. But what only a few can see-people like me, Sadie, and Chef-is the way the faces on these men move. Those things anybody can notice, if they paying attention. They don’t walk right-all jerky and stiff. Or because they sniffing at a chopped-up, half-burnt dog like regular folk sniff a meal.

I can tell right off there’s something peculiar about them. The novella’s protagonist, Maryse Boudreaux, describes them as follows: In this slightly alternative history, some KKK members have turned into Ku Kluxes, creatures from another dimension who feed on humanity’s hate. Ring Shout takes us to a Lovecraftian-infused 1920s America. Djèlí Clark makes those monsters literal. The Ku Klux Klan, galvanized by The Birth of a Nation, no doubt created monsters in the metaphorical sense. The film was shown and re-shown constantly and was also used as a recruiting tool for the KKK for years. Griffith’s racist ode to the Ku Klux Klan helped metastasize the KKK from a regional group of bigots into a national white supremacist organization with millions of members. Many may find resonance with this statement in our current times, but media has been a corrupting influence for decades. There are monsters among us, and sometimes those monsters are fed by the media they consume.

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