A kaleidoscopic portrait of racism in Jim Crow America. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, encountering both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits along the way.
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.'
