Lovecraft Country (Lovecraft Country, volume 1) by Matt Ruff

[james_davis_nicoll]

Meeting long-lost relatives has drawbacks, when those relatives are wealthy, white cultists.

Lovecraft Country  (Lovecraft Country, volume 1) by Matt Ruff 

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

When I meet a white cosmic horror fan, I bring the conversation around to Lovecraft Country. What follows determines whether I will ever speak to them again.

Generally speaking, people get entangled in this stuff for three reasons

Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom (a response to/rewrite of HPL's most viciously racist story) gives a fourth reason: vs oheavat qbja gur ragver jbeyq vf gur pybfrfg guvat gb whfgvpr ba bssre, unaq zr gur zngpurf.

[ba_munronoe]

David Drake's "Than Curse the Darkness" was the first example that came to mind.

https://www.tor.com/2017/03/08/top-ten-reasons-to-summon-an-elder-god-david-drakes-than-curse-the-darkness/

[daidoji_gisei]

When I recommend The Ballad of Black Tom, I include the information that most of the horror comes from humans.

[patrick_morris_miller]

It always does.

[petrea_mitchell]

My standard description of Lovecraft Country runs something like, "it's using the Cthulhu mythos but the real horror is white people".

[dragoness_e]

I haven't read it yet. It sounds very interesting, though.

My summation of Lovecraft's cosmic horror is "If you take out the racism and xenophobia, you get Stephen Baxter." Though sometimes I suspect HPL of being self-aware, because "In the Walls of Eryx" is a poke at arrogant white colonizers.

[ba_munronoe]

That one was written in 1936, the year before his death. I won't say he stopped being a terrible racist (he didn't), but a somewhat more nuanced point of view seems to have developed over time. I'll note that "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow out of Time", both of which seem to espouse the notion that (some) aliens are just folks ("men", in the 1930s vernacular), were written in the 1930s.

[agharta75]

Yeah, those aliens are honorary whites!

[dragoness_e]

For Lovecraft, that is a major bit of character growth. (i.e., his personality, not his characters). He also considered at the end of Shadow over Innsmouth that being an immortal fishman in the depths of the ocean might be kind of cool, actually.

[patrick_morris_miller]

I've always wondered if that was HPL's intended reading of the end of Shadow, or if he considered it the crescendo of the horror.

(Ruthanna Emrys' Winter Tide goes heavy into the "cool, actually" interpretation. I really wish the bean counters had green lit the third novel.)

[estrevan]

Given the last part of the story is a race-swapped escape from a lynch mob in a sundown town, I suspect crescendo of horror. But that’s all the more reason to read against his intention, arguably.

[petrea_mitchell]

This book was published within a few months of Nick Mamatas’ I Am Providence. I wonder how many Lovecraft-themed books appeared in 2016?

ISTR quite a burst of Lovecraft remixes around then. 2016 also gave us The Ballad of Black Tom and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.

I thought "Shoggoths in Bloom" was about then too, but the Internet claims the short story dates to 2008 and even the collection was out in 2012.

[ba_munronoe]

Something in the water?

[bibliofile]

I'm not sure how it started, but that was when more people discussed Lovecraft's racism & such. According to Wikipedia, the movement to change the image of the World Fantasy Award really got going in 2014, so 2016 sounds about right as a publish date for works addressing those Lovecraft issues directly.

[dragoness_e]

Something in the ballot boxes, more like.

[ba_munronoe]

TFW you make a "Colour Out of Space" reference and nobody notices. :)