Gabrielle's Reviews > Lovecraft Country

This book hurt me even more this time than it did when I first read it three years ago. In a good, necessary way. It is the kind of speculative fiction work that does an incredible job of changing a reader's perspective, that makes them think about things in an entirely different way, and shines a light on things you didn't know you needed to see.

Maybe it's even more affective this time around because I have read a ton of James Baldwin and read up on sundown towns and the Tulsa massacre since my first go with this book, but my brain is now equipped with more information to contextualize Atticus and Letitia's stories.

This book acknowledges that some stories will have a hold on our imagination forever, that you can love them even if you know they come from a rotten place, and that no monster will ever be as scary as people can be when they have hate in their hearts.

**

I remember an early episode of "Supernatural", in which the Winchester brothers have to deal with a family of rednecks who hunt, torture and kill humans for sport. Dean finds a Mason jar filled with human teeth in their cottage, and he says something like: "Demons, I get. But this?! This is messed up!". I couldn't agree more with him: monsters and weird creatures from the beyond are scary, but their motivations are relatively easy to figure out: they want your blood, your soul or perhaps your skull. Human cruelty, however, is something that completely defies my understanding.

This might be what makes "Lovecraft Country" work as well as it does. We get the wonderful and spooky creature H.P. spawned with his mind, but we can also see them contrasted with some of the things humans did to each other and have to wonder: which is scarier? Which is worse? Which would I rather have to deal with?

Atticus Turner is a veteran, freshly returned from Korea. He gets a cryptic message from his father Montrose, asking him to meet him in his hometown of Chicago because he found something about Atticus' mother's ancestry that he needs to tell him. But when Atticus gets to Chicago, his father has disappeared, leaving behind clues that he might be somewhere in New England. Together with his science-fiction loving uncle George and his childhood friend Letitia, Atticus decides to go find his father.

George is the publisher of "The Safe Negro Travel Guide", a book listing gas stations, restaurants, hotels and shops across the country that will welcome black customers - because in the era of Jim Crow, the open American road is still not safe for everyone to travel. Atticus, George and Letitia follow Montrose's trail to the manor of Samuel Braithwhite, the leader of a strange group called the Order of the Ancient Dawn. It soon becomes obvious to Atticus that his father was merely bait: he is what these men want, in order to fulfill an occult goal they have been working on for over a hundred years.

It is a rare book that brings together the fun of pulp and the thought-provoking insight of a writer with a strong social consciousness. It's no secret that the more we dig up on dear Mr. Lovecraft, the more he turns out to have been a huge bigot; I know many fans of his work who don't really know how to process this, bringing up once again the age old debate of separating the individual from their body of work. Matt Ruff took what I've always loved about Lovecraftian horror and put it in a brand new light, by pairing them with more mundane horrors: the dangers of driving the roads when the police officers are hostile, the impossibility of buying and retaining property without risking your life, the enticing possibility of stepping through the looking-glass... Each chapter is a short story, but they only work as a continued narrative: each story focuses on one member of Atticus' family and how both the eldritch and day-to-day horrors of the world knock them about. This story takes place in an America that is not as far back in the rearview mirror as we would like to think and the characters are good, flawed people, frustrated by the daily injustices they struggle with. They have to summon a great deal of cleverness and determination to face the Order.

It must be noted that Ruff is quite a sci-fi/fantasy erudite himself: right off from the beginning, there are references not only to Lovecraft, but to other amazing authors such as Bradbury, Heinlein, Stevenson and other masters. Just the sort of stuff to make a genre fiction lover such as myself feel all excited to keep reading.

A lot of books about racial prejudices have made their way into my library lately. Am I reacting to the bigoted political climate that has been making headlines over the past few months? I don't know, but it is definitely something that is weighing on my mind these days. "Lovecraft Country" now sits next to my Octavia Butler books and just like her work, I can't recommend it enough. An eye-opening wink to a great story teller (who was not a very nice guy), beautifully executed.

**

I watched the TV show adaptation of this book on HBO, and I enjoyed it, but with reservations. The pacing of the first few episodes is all over the place, and they made some changes to the plot and the characters (and I've been thinking about it, and I get why they did it, it was important to let those characters talk about their experiences beyond what was on the page). That said, it's visually stunning, the music is fantastic (if occasionally anachronistic) and Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett's performances are amazing. Definitely worth checking out.