At every turn, Ruff has great fun pitting mid-20th-century horror and sci-fi clichés against the banal and ever-present bigotry of the era. And at every turn, it is the bigotry that hums with the greater evil.
Lovecraft Country is a genre-bending attempt to address the severe problem of race in modern America, skewering the prejudices of older pulp works while maintaining their flavor, but it’s also a compulsively readable horror-fantasy in its own right: timely, terrifying, and hilarious.
Though white, Ruff writes plausibly from the viewpoints of his black characters. Their concerns — whether they confront faceless mobs or respond to surprise invitations from scions of America’s unacknowledged aristocracy — seem genuinely driven by their own agendas, not the author’s. Ruff also avoids the common error of homogenizing the thoughts and feelings of these black 'others.'
The episodes grow progressively weaker as the book progresses and the more directly they are concerned with the overarching plot, the less interesting they are ... Ruff’s book is enjoyable enough, and should entertain readers fond of the genre, but it is at once too safe and too different to approach the master’s house.
In Lovecraft Country the genre and themes are completely in sync, the horror and racial feeding into the other ... This kind of marriage is hardly new, but the perspective here remains fairly radical against the much larger history of white artists presenting non-white groups as a malicious 'other.'
Matt Ruff is to be commended for combining two genres that I couldn’t have considered further apart before now, and doing justice to both. You’ll come for the sci-fi, and stay for the history lesson.
The key to all this is that none of Ruff’s characters are victims, even when they are on the losing side of the ongoing battle ... Given the episodic nature of the stories, this is a book that feels ripe for adaptation ... Ruff pulls off a daring feat of his own in this book as he walks a tightrope between the pulp he is repurposing and his exploration of the racism in America that was inherent in those texts. And he succeeds in creating a series of creepy tales that also show how, for many black communities in America in the 1950s, the real demons were not hidden things that went bump in the night but were in plain sight in the wider society in which they lived.
