I’ve finally started reading Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (a paperback edition of which I picked up at Lovecaft Arts and Sciences in Providence last year). I have to say so far it is excellent. The book details a series of interlinked narratives surrounding African-American army veteran Atticus Turner’s quest to find his missing father: a phantasmagoric road-trip through 50s America on the cusp of the civil rights movement, in which the Lovecaftian horrors lurking at the edges of the text are quickly overshadowed by the very real horror of the casually-violent racism which is both a constant and the norm in the everyday lives of the protaganists.
Salient to the present moment in turning Lovecraftian tropes against themselves to disturb and unsettle in a manner both different and more challenging than usually encountered in the genre.
No comments:
Post a Comment