Lyn's Reviews > Lovecraft Country

H.P. Lovecraft, like many of his time (1890-1937) was by today’s standards, a racist.

His ideas about “inferior” races comes across in many of his stories in varying degrees. Most readers of his work cite The Horror at Red Hook as the low point of this element of his canon. That paranoid and prejudiced story reveals in Lovecraft a viewpoint of “us and them” that goes beyond isolationist philosophy and may shed light on motives for the eldritch, dark themes of his writing.

Many writers since, though, have taken up his occult subjects and ran with them, creating the sub-genre of fantasy / horror now known collectively as “Lovecraftian”. Lovecraft was, like all of us, a mixed bag of good and bad, pluses and minuses, successes and failures. Like Philip K. Dick and an unfortunate crowd of writers over the centuries, Lovecraft’s success came largely after his death. Those influenced by him have taken his gloomy inspiration and created Lovecraftian works that continue to entertain and scare readers today.

Matt Ruff’s 2016 work Lovecraft Country, pays homage to Lovecraft’s arcane work while also casting a satirical tone on the racial elements of Lovecraft’s work and protesting those elements in an entertaining and provocative novel.

Members of an African-American family in the 1950s encounter and engage Lovecraftian components in a tale that Lovecraft himself would likely not have written. Readers follow along to encounter secret societies, ancient allegiances and occult magic. More than this, though, Ruff uses the Lovecraftian themes to describe racism in our society, and history, to be the real horror, far more scary than something old HP could invent.

Reminiscent of Victor la Valle’s excellent 2016 novella The Ballad of Black Tom, this takes more time to get where it's going and the narrative quality of Ruff’s message is diluted with too much over the top commentary. Whereas La Valle’s work is a fast and exciting story that delivers an anti-racial message couched in a good story, Ruff’s work is more ambitious but struggles under its own weight.