Book Review - P. Djèlà Clark's The Black God's Drums
Published by: Tor.com
Publication Date: August 21st, 2018
Format: Kindle, 112 Pages
Rating: ★★★★1/2★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
It's 1884 and the Civil War has been in detente for years, nothing more than a temporary armistice. Skirmishes still break out and old General Tubman is still waging her guerilla war against the Confederate States of America where slavery has reached new levels of horror with the use of drapeto gas. In the free city of New Orleans street urchin Creeper is about to stumble across valuable information that could reignite the war. She lives atop Les Grand Murs, large walls constructed as airship ports that also saves the city from the tempêtes noires that strike New Orleans once a year. Thirteen years ago Creeper was born during one of these storms, making her one of Oya's children. Oya is an Orisha, the goddess of storms, life, death, and rebirth. One night Creeper is hiding in her alcove and hears soldiers for the Confederate States planning a meeting with a Haitian scientist to acquire The Black God's Drums. Creeper isn't naive and she puts two and two together and realizes her information could get her the life she wants aboard an airship as well as save some lives. She approaches an airship captain at Madame Diouf's establishment. The captain, Ann-Marie St. Augustine, was a client of Creeper's mother and is known to smuggle guns for General Tubman. What Creeper didn't realize is that Ann-Marie is the child of Oshun, Oya's sister-wife. It can't be a coincidence, especially once Creeper learns the history of The Black God's Drums. The Black God's Drums are known by another name, Shango's Thunder. Shango is Oya's husband. The weapon has only been deployed once, when Dessalines unleashed it against the French to free Haiti. They won, but at what cost? The storm didn't just decimate the French, it killed so so many Haitians. And the tempêtes noires are the aftermath of Shango's Thunder almost a hundred years later. If the Confederate States were to get this weapon they would unleash it against the Union. But these soldiers aren't the only ones who know of Shango's Thunder making its way to New Orleans. The Jeannots, comprised of disaffected Confederate States soldiers who are patriots to the Old New Orleans and want to take back the city for themselves or destroy it want it as well. It is up to Creeper and Ann-Marie to ban together as sister-wives and save a city they both love.
Before I reread this book to review it, and yes, sometimes I do have to reread books to review them, I read a rather bloated critical darling that just wasn't for me. Transitioning from that epic tome to this spare tale was an awakening as to how magnificent this story is. Coming in at a quarter the word count this book's worldbuilding leaves that aforementioned critical darling in the dust. The perfection of language, the specificity of events, the richness of the storytelling left me begging for more, not begging for it to be over. P. Djèlà Clark is an author whose words sing like the masked Jeannots. But it's really the worldbuilding that is breaktaking. It will literally take your breath away. Here we have an alternative outcome to the Civil War, as in, there isn't yet an outcome. Haiti and the Caribbean are the Free Isles. What Dessalines started in 1791 had a chain reaction for the whole Caribbean. But that had a negative impact on the American Civil War. The Confederate States were going to hold onto slavery at all costs. And a war that ended in our world in 1865 is still happening twenty years later. And while many people will point to the Steampunk elements of this story, that's just the cherry on top of the cake. That's a nice decorative glace touch. But stripe this story down and it's the alternative history that just works so well and is terrifyingly believable and the characters that drive the narrative. Though what I want to point to as working so effectively is the Orisha. For myself whenever you have Gods brought across the seas I can't but help think of American Gods and Anansi, who while West African, doesn't belong to the Orisha. And the reason I always think of American Gods is because it's a concept that Neil Gaiman got right. But I feel the time has come to pass the torch, to get authentic voices to continue the stories, to write new tales. And I can't help but see how the Orisha have been embraced in literature in recent years. Just look to Tomi Adeyemi's Legacy of Orïsha trilogy that really didn't work for me. It's hard to balance the human with the divine, and P. Djèlà Clark did just that. This book should be looked to as a classic in the vein of American Gods if only so we can somehow convince P. Djèlà Clark to write more stories within this universe. He got the Orisha right folks! And that, right there, should be shouted from the tops of Les Grand Murs!
My awakening to vampires didn't happen until 2001. Of course I knew about vampires, I just didn't seek them out. It took Buffy and William the Bloody for that to happen. But prior to that I wasn't in the dark. I knew who Anne Rice was because of an art class acquaintance who was obsessed with her books. I think she was actually the only Goth at my high school which makes me sad. There should have been more. And then you could not be alive in the nineties without knowing about the Tom Cruise Lestat casting controversy. But again, it was background noise. I didn't even see the Interview with the Vampire movie until it was on basic cable. Then I saw it. A lot. Randomly. It's one of those movies you just kind of watch some of and get drawn inexorably in. Eventually, as in only about ten years ago, I thought it was time for me to finally read Interview with the Vampire and I really didn't like it. Gave the book away didn't like it. What's odd is the only thing I actually remember about the book, other than hating it, is Claudia's death scene. That's very vivid in my mind. Also I kind of what to re-read it to see if it's really as bad as I thought it was, so it just goes to show I should hold on to all my books for ever and ever. Which makes it oddly strange that I was so excited for AMC's new Interview with the Vampire. But I was. And it was magical. It transformed the book into something more. The book became a starting off point and from their it grew to be about sexual identity, racism, family, justice, relationships, trauma, abuse, truth, as Louis says at one point to Daniel, now older, wiser, grumpier, and played perfectly by Eric Bogosian, we are on an odyssey of memory. And memory changes, becomes warped, distorted by love and hate. This adaptation is very insular, an almost claustrophobic little world, where thought and language and words are king. Daylight is never seen, everything happens in these opulent little rooms in New Orleans that look and feel like jewel boxes. You actually feel the suffocation that Louis feels while around Lestat. The words swirl around and around in your head so that after an episode you feel lightheaded, as if somehow they snuck into your house and drained you of blood while you watched. Every change is so much for the better that I can not praise the writers of this series enough. But the biggest improvement is when Louis refuses to talk about Claudia's rape at the hands of another vampire. He says that he will not exploit her pain. And that's when I realized the showrunners really knew what they were doing. Claudia's exploitation almost to the point of child pornography in the book is what alienated me from it and they knew they had to point blank say that this adaptation was going beyond the book, making it more modern, more thoughtful, and yes, even a bit more Grey Gardens. And if this entire adaptation just existed to give me Lestat and Louis as Big and Little Edie, then I say it was a job well done.
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