Lovecraft fair

[psocoptera]

I thought Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country (2016) and Ruthanna Emrys' Winter Tide (2017) would make a good reading pair-up, and they did. I'm a longtime Ruff fan and I had quite liked the Emrys novelette, The Litany of Earth, that Winter Tide is based on, although I didn't end up Hugo-nominating it. (For my own reference, my relevant notes from that year are here and here, and my initial brief review was "An awesome Lovecraft story, surprisingly humanist." It didn't make the ballot because the short fiction that year got entirely crapped on by rabid dogs, but would have, perhaps losing to Seanan McGuire or to Kai Ashante Wilson's "The Devil in America", who can say.)

Lovecraft Country is the best thing Ruff has written since Set This House In Order (I found my review of The Mirage here; all I could remember about it was that I had mildly liked it but didn't love it, which sounds about right.) Lovecraft Country is about a black family dealing with white bullshit, both the conventional casually murderous Jim Crow kind and the arcane ritually murderous evil magician kind, which is an excellent use for Lovecraft. The novel is highly episodic - I seem to recall Ruff was maybe originally developing it to pitch as a TV series, but ended up novelizing it instead, which I now can't find any evidence for, but it is actually being turned into an HBO series produced by the Get Out guy and run by the writer of Underground, neither of which I've seen, but who seem based on descriptions of those things like the perfect team for it. Anyways, the episodes are all pretty gripping in a "this will make great TV" way, good action and puzzles and little mysteries, and the portrayal of different aspects of the Black experience in America seemed powerful to me as a white person (and at least one reviewer of color agreed who reviewed it for Tor). And I learned about the Tulsa race riot, which I'm sure I've seen mentioned before but had never really understood what it was. Anyways, I highly recommend it even if you don't have any particular interest or background in Lovecraft. (And there's a fun cameo for Swarthmore, including one of the few non-terrible white people in the book, which is certainly how Swarthmore likes to think of itself...)

Winter Tide I liked less well than I was hoping based on the novelette, although I think that was mostly because I thought it was going to be a slightly different kind of book than it was. There is, nominally, sort of, a plot about the main character (a Lovecraftian-human whose people were also in the Japanese-American internment) helping the FBI with a Cold War threat, but really this is a found-family romance in which the coming together and development of a web of relationships between a number of people is the core of the story and the jacket-copy stuff is just a pretext. We don't have as strong genre conventions for that story as for couples romance, or at least I don't, despite consuming a fair amount of it... writing it in fic... okay, I dunno, maybe I have no excuse, but anyways I kind of missed for awhile that some of the character introductions were "and that's how they met"s, and some of the turning points were the things that would be the story of these people. Well, and some of it is that this book is extremely *non*-episodic; having just finished it I'm already hard-pressed to say what exactly *happened* in it, there aren't a lot of really vivid events to point to like "in the bathroom with the troll" or whatever, until the very end. People read books and get to know each other better and cope with the sadness of the past and deal with horrors from beyond the stars, etc. I did like it, and would recommend it if you like slow-paced character-focused stories, but definitely read the novelette first to get the power of the original concept in its more concentrated form. It happens to be FREE as an ebook until noon on Friday here, so, hey.

(I feel slightly awkward for liking both of these better than "Ballad of Black Tom", which is Lovecraft-used-to-interrogate-American-racism as written by an actual non-white author, but I don't think there's much to do about that other than to keep reading as much as I can by authors of color to find the ones who do click with me, and keep asking myself what kinds of biases I'm bringing to my reading.)

Comments

[ruthling]

i loved Lovecraft Country, too, although it had nothing to do with what I thought it was and also noted the Swat callout. I will look for it as TV because that might rock.