And, it turns out, the key to bringing this evil into the world is Maryse herself, the champion of all the souls bound up in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. During the crew’s normal duties, they uncover a plan to bring the Grand Cyclops, a powerful haint, into the human world. Living in a world where supernatural beings have taken advantage of white supremacy to gain more power for themselves, Maryse and an all-woman crew of monster-hunting bootleggers must fight against both supernatural and everyday evil. That said, the Black magic in Ring Shout is also deeply tied to the Black Christian tradition. In the US, it’s usually the Christian Holy Spirit, but, as a tradition started by people stolen from Africa, it is more a syncretism of African and new, adaptive practices than an actual Christian sacrament. It is worship through singing, dancing, and feeling a holy spirit. Older’s Shadowshaper series and Zoraida Córdova’s Brooklyn Brujas series, the key difference with those series being that the magics are amalgamations of different real-world African and Latinx diaspora practices.Ī ring shout is part of the African diaspora religious practices that came over to the Americas with the people forced into brutal labor. Other books in this subgenre include Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine and Brown Girl in the Ring as well as Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. Djèlí Clark’s unapologetically Black novella Ring Shout is an excellent example of a book in the fantasy subgenre of Black magic.

Ring shout p djeli clark