Reviews - Lovecraft Country

2.83k reviews for:

Lovecraft Country

Matt Ruff

4.01 AVERAGE

luna_bane's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous challenging dark informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

sandygandy's review against another edition

3.5

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

jtniehof's review against another edition

4.0

The origins as a TV treatment show a: this is a "serial novel" where each story is self-contained but pieces together into the whole. Coming up for air at each break keeps this from being the trademark Matt Ruff experience of reading the entire back half in one sitting. It also means the PoV character rotates frequently, so the reader has to be on their toes tracking apparently minor characters. There's definitely a point to the story; I had it figured out about halfway in but it's made explicit at the end (in a way that works well, not insert-the-moral-here). I'm going to go looking for reviews and see how many people think that the Jim Crow stuff is all hyperbole. It's woven in really well and, knowing Ruff's work, I presume it's well researched. It managed to get across a different sense for me of the daily lived experience of racism. I'm uncomfortably aware that's a perspective from fiction by by a white author and I do wish he'd taken the opportunity to put in a list of references (some may be implicit in the acknowledgement names.)

moiraburke's review against another edition

4.0

Despite the jacket synopsis, this isn’t much of a pulp horror novel, but rather a frightening commentary on racism in America. Though it’s set in the 1950s, the themes resonate today, with white police threatening black motorists, black boys having no voice, white women given every benefit while black women are belittled, and unfair housing policies. And in that regard, the novel is really good. The author conveys the terrors felt by his black protagonists viscerally, both the everyday threats and the supernatural ones. The only drawback is that it’s told as a series of related vignettes, and each one is rather anticlimactic and shallow. It takes several vignettes to understand the underlying plot; on their own they’re well written but not very satisfying. Perhaps if it had been written as interwoven chapters it might have made the supernatural plot feel more substantive. But regardless, as a treatise on racism, this novel is excellent.

crackityjones's review against another edition

5.0

I expected this book to be a kind of pleasant diversion, but I ended up really loving it. It is really clever and really uncomfortable to take the horror tropes of pulp fiction and put them up against the real horror of being black in America; while Lovecraft was terrifying people with often racist stories whose horrors were nonetheless imaginary, the Jim Crow Laws were in full affect. Black Americans were living in real terror all of the time. By letting those two things live next to each other, Ruff highlights some of the most uncomfortabe truths about contemporary America - the way we ignore our society's latent racism while we wring our hands about completely imaginary horrors. Here, those imaginary horrors are a group of sorcerers whose control of natural philosophy leads to disaster more often than not; in our society it's more commonly the abstract fear of the breakdown of the American family, a loss of Christian values, and other vague specters that politicians drag out to terrify white people. It's a ruse, but one that tends to take precedence over the real horrors happening here every single day.

I love that this book takes on that dichotomy, but I think that it works so well because as a collection of pulpy horror stories, this book is fantastic. Ruff plays the old tropes well: there are vengeful ghosts and arcane societies, aliens and other worlds, magical rituals and hidden treasure. The family at the center of these stories is dealing with some truly fucked up magical shit, and it's to Ruff's credit that the supernatural is terrifying but doesn't ever overshadow the terror experienced by any black family in 1950s America.

My favorites were probably "Abdullah's Book" and "Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe", but they were all good.