#matt ruff

read in 2025: lovecraft country by matt ruff

Lovecraft: "Everyone who isn't a WASP is weird! Marine life is weird! Women are weird! I'M TERMINALLY UNCOMFY!"

Modern-Day fans of the Mythos:

This month's last-minute review is brought to you by something of a reading slump. I've read a fair number of good books this month, if you look at the ratings I've given them, but no books that I've gotten excited about, that I've felt were unexpectedly good enough that I had to talk about it.

Until now.

Lovecraft Country was my first Matt Ruff, and it's not going to be the last. It's well-written, with strong characters and good humour, and a really interesting structure. It's a smart book, and feels very grounded and real. Is it an astounding book? No, but it does its thing very well and I enjoyed reading it more than I thought I would.

Let's start with the structure, because that's one of the things that impressed me most. It's a novel-of-stories, with each chapter being a different character on their own adventure, but there's still a narrative arc for the book, clues the characters gather and the readers pick up on, and nastiness that builds and builds until the final showdown. It's a tough structure to pull off, but Ruff's done it.

I also liked that the structure lent itself very well to a sort of puzzle-box story. You get all these clues and hints about what's truly going on, even if you don't realize that till later, and even though you kind of know where the book is going, watching everything slowly slot into place and trying to put everything together before the characters do is a good part of the fun. It's a lot like watching good SFnal TV, which Ruff's author's note says this was meant to be; you get invested in the characters and the individual "episodes", but there's meaning in that key, that comic book, that thing in the forest. Surely there must be, but how?

And the characters! I loved all the point-of-view characters—they're smart, opinionated, complicated, aware of the forces acting against them and doing what they can to avoid them. I was scared for them, I wanted them to succeed, all that good stuff. The white people are also believably drawn, in that they're self-important, greedy, and used to power, but also, when the story allows for us to see it, sympathetic and complicated all the same.

It's hard to say whether this is science fiction or fantasy, but it's definitely in that wheelhouse rather than being a straight-up historical novel. There are ghosts and monsters and grimoires and secret dimensions and a lot of other stuff you might expect to find in a book that's influenced by pulp fiction and early sci-fi and horror. But, as with a lot of genre work that tackles such things these days, Ruff has fun with this stuff while also adding a social twist to them. In this case, having a Black cast allows Ruff to illuminate and comment on the racism inherit to the 1950s. There's humour to it, but in a way that helps the points hit home.

And that brings me to the last thing I need to mention: that this is a book about Black people written by a white man. It's also written primarily for white people, as far as I can tell, because while the characters take redlining and sundown towns for granted, Ruff doesn't assume that his readers will even know what those are or, if they do, be aware how they actually impact people. However, Ruff's also done his research and tackled the subject thoughtfully. The characters don't conform to stereotypes but are definitely informed by their pasts. The stuff they face goes beyond the usual talking points of Black History For White People; there's mention of boycotts of racist businesses, the Tulsa race massacre, the intricacies of buying real estate while Black, the difficulties of loving science fiction when everyone who writes it hates you. And of course he acknowledges that dealing with racist BS on a daily basis and constantly being underestimated puts you at an advantage when there's some really massive BS going down. I thought Ruff handled it all very well, without being heavy-handed or going into anything that he couldn't do justice. (Well, maybe Ruby's story. I need to think about that one more.)

In Lovecraft Country, Matt Ruff pulled off a genius inversion: retelling the racist horror tales of HP Lovecraft in reverse, from the perspective of the Black people whom Lovecraft so viciously loathed, casting as villains the white supremacist sorcerers whom Lovecraft turned into heroes:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/16/matt-ruffs-lovecraft-country-where-the-horror-is-racism-not-racist/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/21/the-horror-of-white-magic/#anti-lovecraftian

I'm so chuffed about the latest episode of Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast I co-host with Annalee Newitz.