Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Re-read, 7/22/20:

I'm going to go ahead and give it another star. It's really holding its own for me and enjoyed it, even more, the second time. Ah, the Great White hope, indeed.

F*** this S***.

:)

Suffice to say, the '50s racism, if it was even half as bad as it is portrayed here, still seems rather freaking familiar as the kind we have today. Without the riots OR the solidarity, of course.



Original review:

There are two ways that I enjoyed this novel.

The first was the racism angle and the happy ending despite all the horrible things that happen in this tale and against blacks in the good-ole-boy country in 50's 'murica. Racism, enslavement on multiple levels, the desire to try on another skin, all of it was both a repudiation of fantasy and pulp fiction's other skewed-ness way from black heroes. This novel dealt with the issues head-on and I liked it. :)

The second was how the novel was also a huge sample-dish of horror tropes, a love story to cultists, sorcerers, well-researched secret societies, evil doll tropes, tentacles, paranoia, haunted houses, and so much more. The author knows his shit. Lovecraft? Sure, but think of a slightly milder take, not quite attempting to draw us deeper and deeper into the depths of awe-turned-horror, but skipping us across strangeness to strangeness across the entire tale, sampling a bit of each dish while focusing more on character-journeys that don't quite make them go insane or get pulled into other dimensions or get eaten by non-euclidian geometries.

This is an anti-racist funhouse of horrors. :)

Of course, if you are subject to racism, yourself, you might just fall into this tale and call it a novel of pure horror, but at least you can rest assured that there will be a happy ending. :)

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