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

[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.