Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars When Racism More Pernicious than Lovecraftian Horror In Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) the eight stories make a composite novel about the African American Turner and Berry families and their friends as they encounter the malign Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn, an organization of white natural philosophers (call them wizards or alchemists at your peril) scattered across the USA in big cities like Chicago and tiny towns like Ardham (not Arkham!). The Turners et al have to deal especially with the descendants of the Order’s 18th-century founder, Titus Braithwhite, namely the amoral mad occult scientist Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb (pretty “likeable for a white guy” but may be the devil incarnate). Each story features a different point of view protagonist and a different supernatural challenge. Initially bemused by the supernatural, the characters quickly accept it and try to deal with it. After all, they have grown up in Jim Crow America, always having to be very careful around white people, whose natural dangers have prepared them for the supernatural ones. Here is an annotated list of the stories: The novella “Lovecraft Country” reveals to Atticus Turner, a 22-year-old African American Korean war vet, the existence in 1954 Jim Crow America of weird things like those he’s read of in H. P. Lovecraft stories: a mysterious silver car, an unseen powerful noisy thing in the woods, a community of serfs living around a manor house, an occult cult of natural philosophers, and a portentous ritual. But maybe the scariest and most dangerous things are everyday white people like racist policemen. In addition to Atticus, the story features his wise uncle George Turner (publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide!), his feisty childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, and his spicy father Montrose. 4 stars. After Letitia buys the very haunted Winthrop House in a white neighborhood in Chicago in “Dreams of the Which House,” she then stubbornly attempts to get the white ghost if not the neighborhood to accept her (You don’t want to play poker? How about chess?). This real estate deal can’t have some connection with Caleb Braithwaite, can it? 4 stars. “Abdullah’s Book” concerns a notebook of back wages (plus interest) owed a family slave ancestor, Caleb Braithwaite, a scary and comedic Chicago Museum of Natural History heist of an occult Book of Names attempted by some members of the Prince Hall Freemasons (including George, Montrose, Atticus, and a small and eager dentist), and a surprising and almost satisfying conclusion. 4 stars In “Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe,” Hippolyta, “a giantess and a negress” and a scout for husband George’s The Safe Negro Travel Guide, as well as an amateur astronomer, visits Warlock Hill in Wisconsin to check out the observatory of the somewhat deceased Order of the Ancient Dawn member Hiram Winthrop and finds herself looking through a telescope at another world and then having to decide whether or not to jump through a “doorway” into it. Some strange, sublime sf: “She steadied herself and turned around, to find Ida staring at her from several feet and thrillions of miles away.” 4 stars In “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” Letitia’s sister Ruby (an accepting and deferring doormat) comes in for some serious temptation by learning firsthand how much easier her life would be white. Is the mysterious and creepily clean-cut Caleb Braithwhite “the devil”? Or just “a man who knows what he wants and how to get it?” The story is my least favorite, partly because I can’t believe pious Ruby would do what she does in it. 3 stars “The Narrow House” is devastating. Caleb B makes another offer that can’t be refused, sending Montrose and Atticus to find Hiram Winthrop’s son Henry Winthrop, who ran away to be with a black maid, with whom he had a son of his own, so they can retrieve some potent books from the guy. This story highlights “the horror, the most awful thing, to have a child the world wants to destroy it to know you’re helpless to help him” in the context of racism and the horrifying Tulsa Massacre. 4 stars To get intelligence on his mother, in “Horace and the Devil Doll” the Chicago branch of the Order targets Horace, the sweet, creative, imaginative, and asthmatic twelve-year-old son of Hippolyta and George Berry. It features a nasty spittle curse and a creepy pygmy African witchdoctor devil doll. Can Caleb B help? At what cost? 3.5 stars 8. The Mark of Cain This story depicts the climactic showdown between rival members of the Order of the Ancient Dawn from Chicago and Ardham trying to wipe each other out, with Atticus as the prize, without reckoning on the formidable interference of the Turner and Berry and Dandridge families plus a few of their friends. I found it a bit over the top, unconvincing, and convenient. 3 stars The audiobook reader Kevin Kennerly does a fine job without over-dramatizing his voice for kids or women or old people or white or black people. He understands the story and reads it with enough enthusiasm and intelligence to enhance it. I enjoyed the book: it’s scary, funny, moving, and exciting. Ruff writes a straight-forward page turning story with teeth and heart. I like the references to Barsoom, Bradbury, and Lovecraft et al. (“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though.”) I got a kick out of Horace’s homemade comics about Orithyia Blue (inspired by his mother). I like the main characters and their relationships. The descriptions are vivid, the plots tight, and the dialogue often funny, especially via Montrose, like when he nails John Carter for being a Confederate officer or says things like, “You want me to go to Philadelphia and pick up the trail with my special Negro powers?” I like (painfully) the touches about racism in the US, which was worse in pre-Civil Rights era USA (e.g., in 1921 and the Tulsa massacre, which shaped the Turner and Berry families, and in 1954, when the story takes place, and, for example, black realtors couldn’t join the national realtor association) and which Ruff (as a white guy) has researched and thought and felt and imagined a lot about, and which also tell us a lot about how it’d feel to be a person of color today, because although things are better now, they are definitely not fair or equal either. By the way, in its depiction of a world in which the supernatural horrors are not worse than the discriminatory dangers the characters of color face in the USA, it resembles Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation books, though Ireland, unlike Ruff, is African American, and she’s writing supernatural alternate history while he writes supernatural historical fiction. And Victor la Valle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is more Lovecraftian in spirit than Ruff's novel. View all my reviews
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