Lovecraft Country - Hardcover

Ruff, Matt

4.02

44,425 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1509883347 ISBN 13: 9781509883349

Publisher: Picador, 2018

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Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George – publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide – and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite – heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors – they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.

At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn – led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb – which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his – and the whole Turner clan’s – destruction.

An imaginative blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism – the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.

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Review:

Great fun. You can see why Lovecraft Country has been optioned by HBO for a TV series, and the book’s broader political point, that even ostensible liberals like Caleb Braithwaite exploit the labour of African Americans, as their ancestors did during the slave-owning era, is well made . . . None of the book’s other-worldly encounters feel as dangerous as those moments when a black character runs afoul of a tired police officer or vicious sheriff. (Telegraph)

Smartly subversive pulp horror . . . The book is beautifully structured . . . This must be one of the kindest works in the horror genre I have read. Although the stories have genuine moments of horripilation, what shines through is solidarity, conscience and not backing down in the face of wickedness. (Stuart Kelly Guardian)

Another "only Matt Ruff could do it" production. Lovecraft Country takes the unlikeliest of premises and spins it into a funny, fast, exciting, and affecting read (Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon)

At every turn, Ruff has great fun pitting mid-twentieth-century horror and sci-fi clich�s against the banal and ever present bigotry of the era. (New York Times Book Review)

A brilliantly conceived story brilliantly executed (Christopher Moore, author of Lamb and A Dirty Job)

Lovecraft Country doesn't just race along, it tears, demanding that you keep turning its pages without interruption (Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother)

Ruff’s worldbuilding is a blend of magic, researched realism, and adventure story. (LA Review of Books)

Nonstop adventure that includes time-shifting, shape-shifting, and Lovecraft-like horrors ... Ruff, a cult favorite for his mind-bending fiction, vividly portrays racism as a horror worse than anything conceived by Lovecraft in this provocative, chimerical novel (Booklist)

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. (Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog)

Ruff shows with great cleverness how it’s possible for a group of victims to appropriate the very methods used to victimize them, master those methods, and bend them to serve their own purposes. (Locus)

Book Description:

Matt Ruff, the critically acclaimed cult novelist, makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.

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