#matt ruff

[bruiselikeviolets]

read in 2025: lovecraft country by matt ruff

“What you going to do?" she cried. "You break my neck, and then what? You think I won't come back and haunt you? Go ahead! Make me a ghost! See what that gets you.”

[leam1983]

Eldritch Pride

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:

[usermadripoor]

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

[butididnottried]

Unfortunately, i'm not a big reader, but i manage to read/listen to a few books during a whole, long year.

13 books of polish author Marta Kisiel, who wrotes mostly urban fantasy

Matt Ruff "Lovecraft country"

Louise L. Hay "You can heal your life"

Stanisław Bereś, Stanisław Lem "So says Lem"

Krystyna Boglar "Every dog has two ends"

Liu Cixin "Death's end"

Pierre Boulle "The Planet of the Apes"

Tetro Tony, Ambrosi Giampiero "Con/Artist"

Voting ended onFeb 18, 2025

[ninja-muse]

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.)

So yeah, I was surprised by this book on a few fronts, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. The humour and love of SF tropes, balanced with the antiracism and social commentary, was right up my alley, and the way Ruff told the story was the cherry on top. Like I said, it's not an amazing book—it might have pushed the boundaries of speculative fiction when it came out but it certainly doesn't now—but it entertains and enlightens and does so cleverly. This won't be my last Matt Ruff, like I said above, but I'm also not likely to pick up another one for a while. Maybe in a year or two when I get a hankering for the sort of stuff he does.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Matt Ruff's "Destroyer of Worlds"

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

Country was adapted by Jordan Peele into a spectacular TV serial — no mean feat, given how much of Ruff’s brilliant characterizations relies on the novelist’s trick of giving readers direct access to characters’ thoughts and internal states, something that is off-limits to screen adaptations without recourse to cheap tricks like voice-overs.

Today, Harpercollins releases The Destroyer of Worlds, a spectacular followup to Country that revisits the characters, setting, and supernatural dread of the original:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-destroyer-of-worlds-matt-ruff?variant=40490768957474

Country was structured as a series of linked novellas, each one picking up where the previous left off, with a different focal characters. Destroyer is a much more traditional braided novel, moving swiftly amongst the characters and periodically jumping back in time to the era of American slavery, retelling the story of the settlement of the Great Dismal swamp by escaped slaves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Dismal_Swamp_maroons

Few writers can manage a cast of characters this large with Ruff’s deft hand — they are likable, individual, and we root for all of them as they strive to save themselves from the eldritch forces that can only be temporarily vanquished.

It makes for an extremely fast-paced, high-stakes read, as we ping-pong around the Jim Crow south and all the way to the end of the universe. The white sorcerers of Country are still in the frame, as ghosts and exiles — a parable for the tireless nature of white supremacist hatred, and of the festering sores on the American body politic that have suppurated and multiplied in the absence of cleansing truth and reconciliation.

HP Lovecraft was a gifted writer, but he was not a good person. Even by the standards of his day, his racism was particularly vicious, and Lovecraft mixed that viciousness with his prodigious talents to paint the targets of his loathing in the most visceral, cruel light. It was so ugly that even Robert E Howard lectured him about it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140701000000/http://read.barretta.cc/post/89727018274/you-express-amazement-at-my-statement-that

“People claiming to possess superior civilization have always veneered their … looting, butchering and plundering… by [claims] of art, progress and culture.”

And yet, Lovecraft’s work made a substantial, undeniable mark on the field, and the literary techniques he invented, advanced and/or perfected are woven into our literature. Rather than deny this influence, some of the field’s best writers have sought to redeem it, wresting Lovecraftian techniques from Lovecraftian ideology.

Ruff is part of that tradition, but by no means all of it. 2019 saw the publication of NK Jemisin’s stunning The City We Became, an anti-racist Lovecraftian tale in which New York City’s glorious riot of race, color, language and viewpoint is set to be devoured by a conservatisizing, homogenizing eldritch power from another universe:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the-old-crow-is-getting-slow/#i-love-ny

Exicitingly, City We Became now has a sequel, The World We Make, which has gotten rave reviews:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/n-k-jemisin/the-world-we-make/9780316509893/

The literature of anti-racist, anti-fascist Lovecraftian horror is a broad and exciting one, including RPGs:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1122788890/lovecraftesque/description

And David Nickle’s essential duology, Eutopia (2011):

https://boingboing.net/2015/03/10/eutopia-horror-novel-about-lo.html

and Volk (2017):

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/10/11/volk-a-sinister-lovecraftian-tale-of-eugenics-naziism-and-radiant-abomination/

Nickle has written well and extensively about Lovecraftian horror and race:

http://davidnickle.ca/dont-mention-the-war-some-thoughts-on-h-p-lovecraft-and-race/

And the last word on Lovecraft scholarship is certainly Les Klinger’s The New, Annotated HP Lovecraft (2014)

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780871404534

Attentive readers will recall that Klinger is the Sherlockian attorney who successfully defeated the Doyle estate’s copyfraud claims that the Sherlock Holmes stories were still in copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/20/free-for-2023/#oy-canada

The benefits from the works of Doyle, Lovecraft, and all other authors eventually return to the public domain is neatly illustrated in this new Lovecraftian creativity. If Lovecraft had to stand alone, uninterpreted and unrebutted, we would lose his brilliance along with his wickedness. But because Lovecraft now belongs to all of us, he can be reworked, challenged, argued over, problematized, and preserved, even if he can never be redeemed.

[Image ID: The cover of Matt Ruff's 'Destroyer of Worlds.']

[a-ramblinrose]

✨️📖 A Goodwill Book Haul 📖 ✨️

[charliejaneanders]

Our Opinions Are Correct: Episode 133: Silicon Valley vs. Science Fiction: Ayn Rand

One science fiction author has influenced the leaders of the tech industry more than any other: Ayn Rand, who preached radical selfishness i

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

We look at the science fiction author who influences Silicon Valley the most: Ayn Rand! How does Rand's gospel of selfishness shape the technology we all use every day? We get deep into Rand's impact on tech, with philosopher Matt Zwolinski and author Matt Ruff.