Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

I am finding Lovecraft Country a hard book to review. It's because I'm very sure I don't have the expertise to know if Ruff, a white man, did a good job writing about a world where Lovecraftian monsters coexist with real-life racism as experienced by Black men and women in the 1950s. From my position, I think he does an okay job, but I"m not close enough to tell, and if someone who had experience with racism wanted to talk about what he got wrong, I'd be happy to further inform myself.

So, acknowledging that I'm starting from an outsider perspective reviewing a book written by someone with an outsider perspective of race...it doesn't ring any immediate alarm bells? Ruff integrates Lovecraftian magicians and the attendant dangers with police stops, discriminatory house-selling agreements, threats of violence, barriers to opportunities, and the dangers from authorities who are actively hostile. (And, you know, Jordan Peele is part of adapting it for the screen, so it doesn't seem to have been particularly egregious in anything.)

For all that, this is a fairly light novel - dangers are threatened, but it remains more of an adventure yarn than the kind of deep horror that keeps threatening to burst out, but never quite completes the summoning rituals.

The stories centre around a man named Atticus and his family - his father, his uncle, aunt, cousin, and a couple of women in his community who are sisters. He is recently discharged from the army, travelling back to Chicago through the South, encountering Jim Crow laws and sundown counties. Once he gets home, though, he discovers that his father has gone missing - he left to go talk to someone in Ardham about a family connection that his wife had.

Atticus, a science fiction and fantasy fan, doesn't miss how close that spelling is to Arkham, but sets off anyway with his uncle George, a publisher of the Safe Negro Travel Guide, and Letitia, one of the two sisters who will also populate these stories. He finds his father being held by an old white guy who wants Atticus' blood for a classic Lovecraftian ritual, wanting to wrest power from the elder gods to cement his position here on earth.

I haven't read a lot of Lovecraft, but the theme developed here of rich white guys thinking their wealth and privilege gives them immunity from eldritch horrors is a good one.

In this case, the son, Caleb, wants some of that power for his own. He talks like he sees Atticus as an equal, but he still assumes Atticus and other members of his community will do whatever he says, and brings pressure to bear when they don't - more subtle pressure, but pressure nonetheless.

As we go from what is really short story to short story, with a common cast of characters, the twin dangers of racism and Mythos horror lurk in the background, but when they come into the foreground, it isn't as unrelentingly dark as you might imagine, and I think I like that as a choice. Not every story needs to be one where everyone is ground down to a pulp, and if anyone has experience on continuing in live, even live well, in difficult situations, it's these characters.

Caleb keeps reappearing in these characters' lives, always wanting just a little more, trying to buy trust when he can, and force assistance when he can't. He is in the middle of a power struggle with other cultists, and all of them seem to forget how very dangerous lurking terrors can be - the human forces are almost always scarier in this book than the inhuman.

I am glad this wasn't grimdark in the end, even though sometimes you feel like Cthulhu mythos could be a *bit* scarier - but then, I find the human opponents create more tension, and the ways in which these characters cope are really, in the long run, entertaining and enjoyable.