This was a damned powerful novella to read. If there are any history teachers out there reading this review: seriously consider using this book to teach kids about the Jim Crow South. The research behind it is meticulous - the author is a professor of history specializing in the trans-Atlantic slave trade - and, as any serious reader can tell you, just because something is fiction doesn't mean it's not true.
The spec fic premise of this is that lots of the higher-ups in the Confederacy - Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson - were sorcerers. After the South’s defeat, they cast spells to summon monsters - known as Ku Kluxes - and used them, along with their white allies, to terrorize the freedmen. The Klan was suppressed, but came back much stronger in the early 20th Century. Using the new technology of motion pictures, D.W. Griffith was able to cast the spell over the whole country using his new movie The Birth of a Nation, and the Klan reappeared in both the North and the South.
The protagonist of this book is a Black woman named Maryse in rural Georgia in 1922, who (along with some friends and allies) hunts Ku Kluxes and protects Black people from the Klan.
Having the Ku Klux Klan be composed of literal monsters instead of metaphorical monsters was a depressingly easy leap to make. Just how closely this book hewed to actual American history made it distinctly uncomfortable to read. It’s a period of history that people should know more about, especially in light of this summer’s protests.
I’d call this horror rather than fantasy, and there’s a lot that I’m concerned would go over the head of non-American readers (and more Americans than there should be, as well). I tried to keep that in mind while reading, and how it might seem to someone unfamiliar with Nathan Bedford Forrest, or Stone Mountain, or the vague, ominous references to something that happened recently in Tulsa. Clark doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail, but I think this would still work very well. Curious to see if there’s any non-Americans who have read this and might weigh in.
In the end, this is, as I said, a damned powerful story. It’s kind of in the same category as American History X, in that it’s something I feel everyone should read. Just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it can’t contain powerful truths.