Lovecraft Country

A collection of interrelated short stories with a Lovecraftian feel. Not my genre, but an OK book. Overall the stories had just a little hint of the weird and very little of the horror. Not all have the same quality.

I liked the first and last one the most. I did not like the end though. First, it was a happy ending. Lovecraft stories shouldn't have a happy ending. They should convey hopelessness and despair when you realized you're faced with forces beyond your comprehension and despite of all your efforts, the best thing you can do is go mad in order to cope with them.

The second thing was the fate of Braithwhite. It was appropriate but undeserving I think. Undeserving because despite his manipulative demeanor, he was the only white person that treated the black characters as human beings. Not only that, he highly favored them, giving them protection, money and even putting his services as wizard available in order to improve their lives. Appropriate because the main characters were simple, God fearing, poor, country folk. They resented Mr. Braithwhite because he was white, rich and dealing with 'satanic forces'. More importantly, they couldn't see that he was doing his best to keep them safe, and it was other people that wanted to see them harmed. He had no choice but to force himself into their lives.

So much fun. It feels like reading a television show. Each chapter moves the main story along, but they each have their own distinct set of influences.

It's a fascinating story made better by where it's set and the main characters. It's a little slow to start, but check it out. The ride is worth it.

I'd call this a diverting read that's easily consumable but lightweight. The drama and tension don't ratchet up that much, and the characters escape dangers without consequence. Throughout the novel there is an oversimplified good vs. evil morality. It's set up as episodic, like a serialized story or ready-for-television treatment. Each little mini-section features Atticus, a young army vet of the Korean war and/or members of his extended family and friends. Various characters connected to Atticus are protagonists of an episode, each of which has its own mini-arc. I wouldn't call them short stories because they are interdependent and part of the full novel. Ruff offers the value of having protagonists who are minorities, characters who historically were frequently marginalized, demonized, stereotyped, ignored or worse in some of the horror/science fiction tales he's referencing. Unfortunately, Atticus and company aren't well-developed characters. My cynical assumption being that he can't write them with human failings or he'd get slammed for showing Black characters in what could be perceived as a negative light. Instead, we end up with bland, empty characters, filling their role in the plot. The one that comes off best is Atticus's love interest, Letitia. She is a brave and quick-witted woman, but lacks any flaws that make a memorable character. Trying not to offend is a weak choice. The antagonists are even less interesting. The scenes of white racists harassing Atticus and his family happen so often, they lose impact. With the exception of Caleb Braithewhite, who is the big bad guy but oddly not an overt racist, most of the white characters are empty shells, demonstrating racism rather than portraying flawed and ignorant racist individuals. They're also easily defeated by the protagonists, or more often by some vengeful supernatural intervention. A story where Atticus or Letitia or any of the others had deliberately called up supernatural beings to punish truly complex, evil racist characters could have been an interesting revenge fantasy. Or maybe could have led to something where the protagonists had to cooperate with white characters to fight a mutual enemy, and consequences and character growth could have stemmed from that. There isn't much character growth at all because problems vanish with little difficulty. In the chapter called “Dreams of the Which House,” Letitia buys the Winthrop house, a building haunted by the former owner. Winthrop is hostile at first but quickly becomes her friend when she holds her ground. I like the idea, but the alliance happens so easily that it isn't satisfying. The end of the first episode, where Samuel Braithewhite and the Order of the Ancient Dawn call up the “light of creation,” is reminiscent of the “well of souls” scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, with members of the Order in the role of the Nazi cultists. That was a decently-executed allusion to a famous bit of pop culture that made a comment without calling it out in so many words. I would have liked a few more scenes like this.The mention of Atticus as a science fiction reader of Lovecraft, Bradbury, Heinlein, etc. feels a little self-conscious to me. A book like this that's using horror as social commentary should be better than the source material it's commenting on; but it isn't. There are no genuine chilling moments and no fresh ideas. A better read for commentary on Lovecraft is [b:The Ballad of Black Tom 26883558 The Ballad of Black Tom Victor LaValle https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447086249l/26883558.SY75.jpg 46932536] by Victor LaValle, which had a focused, tight story with complex morality.

I love the works of Lovecraft, but I love works that draw from lovecraftian mythos a lot more because they can use the good parts and cut out the racism and misogyny. Lovecraft Country, however, takes the idea one step further. Instead of ignoring or excusing the problems, it leans into them to show how much scarier they are than any tentacled horror. It's a brilliant book, and really does a great job as both historical and supernatural fiction.

I had this idea to spend October reading romance books as my own little protest against “spooky season”, primarily because I'm not really interested in horror.

But then, this was on my shelf...

In the end it didn't feel very “horror-y”, but then I'm not an experienced horror reader. The part of the book that seemed most important to me was the fact that the main characters are African American in the 1950's. The portrayal of how they were treated by white people, including authorities, was the scariest part of the book, as well as absolutely infuriating.

Some books take effort to get into: you want to give up, but you keep at it and your perseverance is rewarded. This is not that kind of book. It's more the opposite: starts off promising, then gets increasingly tiresome as it goes on. The writing is not memorable, the dialog clumsy, the stories flat and formulaic: introduce our heroes; oh no, a magical threat; heroes scramble to battle the threat, all the while facing racist harassment from muggles; a magical solution is found, yay. Repeat.

And yes, stories. The book boldly proclaims itself “A Novel” on the cover: it's not. It's just one short story after another, each usually with a small subset of characters drawn from a standard cast, taking place in chronological order but with little real connection to each other. I'm told by a friend that there's a TV show with this same name, but I don't know which came first: is this a “novelization” of the TV show? If the book came first, it was pretty blatantly written with TV in mind: each story would make a short, standalone, forgettable episode.

There's no tension, no real consistency. The “magic” is pure handwaving every time, different in each story but without any pretense to any set of rules: more like, hey, let me come up with random ideas, and presto, we have FTL travel, transmogrification, murdering dolls, secret chambers, each of them with their own unique convenient brand-new out-of-the-blue magical solution just in time for the happy end of the episode. I mean story. Oh, and racism is bad (frowny face).

So, meh. Please remember that two Goodreads stars doesn't mean bad, it means “ok”—and that's what it feels like. If I'd stopped reading after the first two stories, I might've considered four... but I didn't stop reading.

This book had me from page one, and didn't let go until the end.

It's 1954 in America, and 22-year-old Vietnam War vet Atticus Turner is driving through Indiana to get to his father's home in Chicago. His car has a flat and with no working spare in the boot, he trudges to the nearest car repair shop to buy a tyre. But the men there wouldn't serve him because he's black, and there's nothing he can do about it. He waits for hours by the side of the road, keeping low, reading a Ray Bradbury (he's a fan), before a service from fifty miles away comes to fix his tyre. When he drives to Chicago the next day, he gets pulled over and his belongings ransacked by a police trooper who doesn't believe he really has books in the trunk of his car.

So opens Lovecraft Country and from the first scene onwards, it is like a train picking up speed, the landscape a segregated but normal America, then the land allows us glimpses of creatures from the dark, and the atmosphere suddenly crackles with magic.

The stories don't have a single central character but the protagonists of each chapter are members of Atticus Turner's family, who, because of their heritage, gets drawn into a power struggle that is as old as time, involving ancient forces beyond normal comprehension. The stories are inter-connected and lead to one satisfying finale.

The novel is fashioned on Lovecraft tales, but without the purple prose (or that's how I recall Lovecraft tales, at any rate) and cleverly interwoven into the fabric of 1950s reality for black Americans, racism very much at the fore and centre, affecting where they lived (and where they could live), where they schooled, how they shopped, and how they travelled (Atticus's Uncle George publishes ‘The Safe Negro Travel Guide' which lets black travellers know which motels, restaurants, and cafes would serve them). The story's villains are constructed of bigotry as well as the supernatural.

It is this brilliant mash-up of ancient and unknown terrors with the familiar horrors of racism that makes this novel a thoroughly exciting, memorable, and entertaining read.

I really enjoyed this! I admit to being a little hesitant at first because I wasn't sure a white guy was the right guy to tell this story but as I read it I changed my mind: maybe it's white people who need to do the work of really confronting the racism in Lovecraft. We need to see his horror for what it really is - not the shoggoths and color out of space - but Lovecraft's racist, anti-Semitic, sexist views. That's the real horror and we as a country have bought into it for too many years.

As far as the narrative, it took me a minute to get used to the serialized nature of it. I LOVED Letitia and Hippolyta and would read more books about their adventures.

Finally, I see that the HBO show has made Caleb into Christina which I think is brilliant! White women consistently put being white above all else so it makes sense to have this evil character be in the guise of someone white supremacy has used as a cover for racism for hundreds of years.

Matt Ruff's initial vision for the book encapsulates it perfectly. He imagined it as TV series pitch ala X-Files where characters explore the unnatural, giving Ruff the opportunity to examine horror, sci-fi and fantasy tropes and how they change when you put a black character at the centre instead.

Atticus Turner and his friends and family find themselves embroiled in a power struggle amongst the Order of the Ancient Dawn. Each chapter follows a distinct character, set within familiar genre standbys like the ancient cult, alien horror, haunted house, evil doll, Jekyll and Hyde and others. The stories are linked and build to an overarching climax but it can be jarring going from chapter to chapter. The paranormal horror also pales in comparison to the realities of being black in Jim Crow America circa 1954.

It's no mean feat being a white author telling the stories of black characters while invoking a racist white writer to inform the themes of the story that explores the black experience against the backdrop of a racially charged America. There is so much that could have gone horribly wrong so it's tellingly significant that my biggest beef is that it didn't offer up enough traditional horror scares.