 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Sorry there haven't been a whole lot of videos lately, haven't been any videos lately. I got a lot on my plate and because this channel is my hobby, it has to take a backseat to other things in my life. Yes, also it is the holiday so I'm spending a lot more time with the family and during the day I'm working on projects I can't talk about. So videos will be few and far between until at least probably the middle of January and then we'll try to work back into some semblance of what we used to do. Maybe not daily but maybe two or three videos a week. Anyways, today we are talking about Ring Shout by P. Jelly Clark. I'm pretty sure I checked this time to make sure I got the name right. That's how the YouTube video that I watched, that's how it was pronounced so that's what I'm going with. This book is about a woman named Marisay or I don't think it's Maris but it might be it's M-A-R-Y-S-E. I couldn't find it that's finitive pronunciation either way so I'm going to go with Marisay. Marisay is a it's rather an urban fantasy but it's like a historical urban fantasy kind of deal. It deals with 1920s or 1930s Georgia. It happens in Macon, a town that I'm very familiar with. I used to live in Warner Robbins way back in the way back but I'm familiar with the town, I'm familiar with the history. There isn't a whole lot about the town but most of the stuff having to do with the Klan and all that stuff rang true to me. What this book is about is Ku Klux Klan members, some of them are actually literally demons and Marisay is a demon hunter. She has a cool sword, sometimes it's smoke, sometimes it's solid. I'm not exactly sure how it works but it was believable while I was reading it. I didn't ever question, wait it only worked this way, this way. It felt true. The writing here is amazing but it's also written in what is it, P-A-T-I-O-S. It's written in vernacular so you're not going to find proper grammar all the time but there are some beautiful passages in the story. The writing is fantastic, it is consistent all the way through but I think what hit me the most here and I said the same thing with Priya Sharma's Orm Shadow is the author, Clark, he commits to the ending and goes all out that shit crazy. The ending is epic. Now it's not weird or abstract or anything like that. It's very clear what's going on but there is an epic battle sequence at the end. The Butcher is a character that I'm going to be thinking about for a while. I can't remember who it was, if it was SA Cosby. Somebody was talking about racism is far scarier when the racist isn't explicitly saying the n-word, isn't explicitly being racist. They're being racist but not explicitly. So they're not saying those damn n-words or that kind of thing. It's a casual flippancy to the degradation of an entire race of people. There's a lot of that in this book and I appreciated the subtleties of it and I think Butcher, the character, is probably the best in the book. I like Chef too but I really, really like the villain here. It's not the main bad but it's close to it. When he is revealed for what he truly is, it was unsettling to me. I don't know how you'll feel. So I'm going to classify this as horror because there were sections of this book that I felt were supposed to unsettle you and I don't really catch that too much in most urban fantasies. Like Richard Cadres, his Sandman Slim series, never did I sit back and go wow that's pretty creepy, that's pretty scary but this one is more along the lines of horror than say like a Sandman Slim kind of deal. So I even hesitate to call it urban fantasy because I don't want to chase anybody away. If you like horror, you're going to dig this book. It's not a bunch of action sequences. There's literary merit in it. It's a very short book. I think it's like 186 pages. I blew through it in like two days. The writing is terrific. I have a lot of stuff. I don't know how I ended up with so much stuff from Clark but I also have another novella and I think I have a short story also. I'll be jumping into those as soon as possible but this rinks up there with me with Orange Shadow and The Ballad of Black Tom. I think they're all also published by Tor, Tom Doherty and Associates. I'm not sure. But anyways, this book's fantastic. I have nothing negative to say about it. I had fun all the way through. There were parts that were creepy, parts that were funny. There is a lot of humor in here but it's not a horror comedy. It's just sprinkled in there to just kind of give you a moment to breathe before the next craziness begins to happen. So have you read Ring Shout by P. Jelly Clark? If you have, let me know down there in the doobly-doo whether or not you loved it, whether or not you hated it. If you loved it or hated it, tell me why you loved it or hated it so that we can have a discussion. But until next time, I have an E, you have an U. This has been another Book Review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!