The Black God's Drums by P Djeli Clark

The Black God's Drums

by P. Djèlí Clark

In an alternate New Orleans caught in the tangle of the American Civil War, the wall-scaling girl named Creeper yearns to escape the streets for the air – in particular, by earning a spot on-board the airship Midnight Robber. Creeper plans to earn Captain Ann-Marie’s trust with information she discovers about a Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God’s Drums.

But Creeper also has a secret herself: Oya, the African orisha of the wind and storms, speaks inside her head, and may have her own ulterior motivations.

Soon, Creeper, Oya, and the crew of the Midnight Robber are pulled into a perilous mission aimed to stop the Black God’s Drums from being unleashed and wiping out the entirety of New Orleans.

Reviewed by celinenyx on

3 of 5 stars

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The Black God's Drums is a fun alternate history/steampunk novella featuring Creeper - a plucky orphan who becomes embroiled in a plot to destroy independent New Orleans.

The writing of The Black God's Drums is very 'voicey', written in a way that closely resembles the main character's inner dialogue. This can be a bit hit or miss - sometimes it can be very jarring if the voice is too overpowering. I thought P. Djèlí Clark did a good job, striking a balance between Creeper's thoughts and more concrete description. In tone, The Black God's Drums resembles Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory a lot; both are steampunk alternate history kind of stories featuring 'unlikely' protagonists. In the case of Karen Memory, that's a young sex worker, and in Drums, the orphaned child of a sex worker. Narratively the stories are very different, but because I read the two so close to each other, I experienced a strange overlapping where it felt like I was reading two books in the same series or universe (while they're obviously not - even though they both contain an unlikely rescue with an airship).

It's a common issue with novellas that they leave readers wanting more, and I felt similarly in this case. The gods inhabiting humans intrigued me, and by the end of the story, I felt like I still wanted to have more details on how this actually works. Ultimately, I think my enjoyment was slightly impeded by the fact that I know very little of the history of the southern United States, and the subtleties of the alternate history presented here were lost on me.

Content Warnings: slavery, weapon of mass destruction, death, death of parent.

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  • Started reading
  • 7 April, 2020: Finished reading
  • 7 April, 2020: Reviewed