Book Review · 16th July 2021

Lovecraft Country

Matt Ruff. Pan Macmillan. (384p) ISBN: 9781509883356

Lovecraft Country

Lovecraft Country

Soon to be an HBO Series! Got to love those printed stickers on books.

Now that the gripe is out of the way 😉 Lovecraft Country was low on the cosmic horror side of the Lovecraftian mythos, but high on the adventure and thrills.

Matt Ruff sets his series of adventures in mid-50s USA, where Atticus Turner has returned from the Korean war and faces the Jim Crow era of continued discrimination and prejudice toward black people in America. This works well against the knowledge of Lovecraft’s racism.

There are twists concerning lost blood lines, power struggles within secret societies, adventures, but none of the cosmic horrors that I’ve come to expect in books written in the Lovecraft universe.

There’s a small cast of characters who are well developed and have their own story arcs within the book, all leading back to the central figures of Atticus and Caleb Braithwaite (boo hiss).

This episodic nature of the stories will play really well to becoming a television show, and after watching the trailers I’m glad it’s getting a high production value outing.

The ending was wonderful with the story lines of various characters being left open enough for us to return to.


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