Lovecraft Country

This was exceptional! Ruff does a fantastic job of crafting relatable, three-dimensional characters, which is the heart of the book. He weaves the sadly mundane horrors and dread of an African-American family during Jim Crow with cosmic horror and weird tales, and it is completely mesmerizing.

Each chapter is basically a short story, with one of the central cast of characters taking POV for that section. Early on the stories track closely with Lovecraft's own fiction, while later chapters pay homage to weird fiction authors from Robert Louis Stevenson to Richard Matheson. And all the while the tension is ratcheted up by the burdens and limitations the characters face due to systemic racism. It's not preachy or forced, just viscerally emotional.

I must say that I also enjoyed the fact that this is both paean and thumb in the eye to H.P. Lovecraft, whose work is forever tainted by his racism. I like to think that were he still alive, Howard would have changed his blinkered assumptions about race and ethnicity, but I'm also content to know that modern authors are taking the good and speaking truth to the bad in his legacy.