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Arley Sorg
As rough as the year has been for the country, it’s been a great time for reading. As if in response to the year itself, a slew of powerful books came out, expanding the scope of genre and engaging in conversations long overdue.
Tochi Onyebuchi’s
Riot Baby kicked things off in January, on the heels of his excellent late-2019 release
War Girls. The story follows Ella as her powers develop, and Kev, who was promising as a kid but ends up in prison. They negotiate their fragile relationship with each other and with their mother, who seems to seek to stifle Ella, all while the potential for Ella to accidentally hurt everyone around her increases. Ultimately, Ella has to figure out what to do with all that power. It’s a searing critique of systemic racism and the justice system, but it’s also a complex book about community, family, and anger.
P. Djèlí Clark’s
Ring Shout is a wildly imaginative, superbly written narrative about friendship, magic, and fighting racism that occupies a strange interstitial space between historical fiction, fantasy, and body horror. It is also a smart reimagining of history that pushes current racial tensions to the forefront and forces readers to remember that bigotry should be fought in all its incarnations.
In 1915,
The Birth of a Nation helped the Ku Klux Klan swell its ranks and stoked the fire of racism across the country. Now the Klan isn’t just a group of angry white folk obsessed with white supremacy and the enslavement of Black people; they want to bring hell to this side of the veil, and they have monsters to help them do it. Luckily there are people who know about them and will do everything in their power to stop the invasion. Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a hilarious sharpshooter named Sadie who carries a rifle named “Winnie,” and Chef, a
2020 was quite the year for science fiction, but it wasn’t all about escaping to other worlds. It’s easy to imagine flights of fancy in a spaceship to be a reprieve to reality, but science fiction and fantasy literature is the product of people with real concerns about the real world, and accordingly, they write about the challenges that we see in the world around us. Over the last 12 months, I’ve been thinking about the value of speculative literature in a time like this. There’s a meme going around that reading is a collective hallucination that we get by staring at bits of a dead tree. That’s certainly accurate, but I like to think of science fiction as a sort of cheat guide or rough map of directions.
Ring Shout, a TV show for Skydance Television based on a novella by
P.Djéli Clark released in October. In the book, the 1915 D.W. Griffith infamous ‘classic’ film is used to summon Ku Kluxes who are non-human entities of the human Ku Klux Klan. Lane will play Maryse Boudreaux, a monster hunter who is assisted by entities known as the Aunties as well as real-life fighters Sadie, Chef, a former Harlem Hellfighter, and a Gullah woman named Nana Jean.
Actress Kiki Layne (Getty Images)
The official synopsis reads:
Ring Shout tells the story of an otherworldly evil that has risen in the 1920s South in the form of monsters who take up residence within the bodies of people filled with hate – namely the Ku Klux Klan. D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” is helping to swell the Klan’s ranks and the monsters are drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of racism. Across the nation they spread fear and violence. But even monsters can die. Standing in their way is a young B