An unusual mix of history and cosmic horror.
The premise of this is that during the height of segregation in the American south in the early part of the twentieth century, the Ku Klux Klan are secretly being controlled by monsters called Ku Klux’s who feed on human’s hate and pain. Fighting them are monster hunter’s who have to deal with both the supernatural threat as well as the mundane hate and discrimination.
The novella is told from Maryse’s POV, who is out for vengeance against them for the death of her family, along with two other women, Sadie and Chef. Not being an American and as familiar with its history, I don’t know how accurate the history is but from what I’ve picked up it is pretty much there but with a whole load of supernatural horror thrown into the mix as well. It definitely got all Lovecraftian towards the end but the mundane horror was pretty out there too.
All the characters speech is written in dialect form and I found it extremely off-putting. Some characters I couldn’t understand at all and for most I still struggled and found it knocking me out of the zone all the time. I don’t like dialogue written as spoken in any books and it really turns me off. I don’t feel it adds to anything and makes things unnecessarily complicated.
I thought the story was good, interesting and something a bit different as I’m not really a horror fan but the whole dialogue thing was such a problem that it was a struggle reading this. A decent read even with this but it could have been so much more enjoyable.
A generous 3 stars.
Barry's Bloody Books 