Twelve
is pretty much the perfect age to stumble onto Lovecraft. At twelve, you’re
young enough not to realize that pseudo-King James language is not a stylistic
plus. You’re young enough to get grabbed right by the brain stem and into an
endless sea of cosmic, impersonal horror. Lovecraft has informed my sense of
what is pants-shittingly terrifying, so whenever I see a book that plays in
this cold and uncaring sandbox, my interest is piqued. The fact that Lovecraft Country is by Matt Ruff, the
author of Bad Monkey, a book about a
bona-fide female anti-hero, only sweetened the pot.
And
then I turned over the book and read the summary. Atticus Turner, a WWII vet
from Chicago, finds out his father has gone missing the summer of 1954. He and
his Uncle George, publisher of The Safe
Negro Travel Guide, have to find him because, you know, Cultists. (For those
who haven’t read Lovecraft, Cultists feature heavily in the dude’s fiction.)
The premise sold me, 100%.
Structurally,
this novel is a lot of fun. It’s more of a series of short stories tightly
interwoven with a subtle dramatic arc than a standard novel with a central
protagonist, which was kind of what the book summary led me to expect. I feel
like it was a more challenging narrative to craft, but Matt Ruff really managed
to keep all those balls in the air. He gave just enough information to
forestall confusion while keeping the level of suspense painfully high. I am a
pretty disciplined person, but I have to admit blowing past my scheduled bed
time more than once during the reading of Lovecraft
Country. Back in the day, I would have joyfully pulled an all-nighter to
finish this book.
The
stories each have a distinct theme, some more overtly Lovecraftian than others,
but the overall feel of the novel was more of a nod to 50’s pulp horror. If you’ve
done any listening to radio drama from the period, narratives like Horace and the Devil Doll will feel
particularly nostalgic. Holy shit snacks, he even drops in a reference to Das Kriegsspiel, the granddaddy of Dungeons and Dragons. But like a writer
worth his salt, Ruff makes these classic tropes work for the narrative in some really
interesting ways, examining issues of race and class in both the segregated
south and the supposedly more liberal north.
For all
of the strangeness of Lovecraft Country,
with its cultists and its doors into hostile, alien realms, the shadow that
looms deepest over the lives of Atticus Turner and his family is racism. The
1950’s tend to get held up as a “more wholesome time” in white American
culture, but there’s a lot of overtly horrifying stuff that gets swept into the
shadows. Lovecraft Country is at its
most unsettling not when the opponents aren’t natural philosophers trying to
unlock untold power, but when the Turners are making their way in white
American spaces. The threat of violence is always in the air. Always. At one
point, Atticus is pulled over by a cop in Indiana and learns that he’s in a
Sundowner Town with just minutes to spare before sunset.
Sundown
in Indiana was of many points where Ruff could have taken a side road. Lovecraft Country could have gotten a
whole lot grimmer. A whole lot more claustrophobic. It’s not so much a
criticism I’m leveling here. Writers have to make choices that will limit what
a novel can do. Ruff’s choices were legitimate, they served to make Lovecraft Country my choice of this
summer’s good read. But there’s a novel out there that hasn’t been written yet,
one in an entirely different Lovecraft country, where all the real monsters
wear human faces, one that I think deserves to be written.
