Lovecraft Country
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.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
9mentions
8people
2016–2026years
44% recommend56% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I don't, especially when the artist flows into the art.
Take H.P. Lovecraft. Very big name in supernatural horror, created Great Cthulu and various other tropes that survive and are influential to today. Famously misogynistic and racist. Particularly on the racism side it's not really even fair to say he was 'of his time', it seems to go beyond that.
And it's all there in the fiction. Fear of the other, racist tropes about clothing and appearance and mistrust of women. The works are pretty amazing, he spins an atmosphere so well. His ideas of horrors beyond time and space are well realised (with a lot of emphasis on what is not seen) and his dreamy fantasy sequences really work and draw me into a dreamlike state. But they're all run through with racist stereotypes about people (or demons) with darker skin or racialised features.
Does this mean no Cthulu for anyone? I don't believe that's a good answer either, but I also don't believe one should consume the art in ignorance.
(And I very much enjoyed reading Lovecraft Country a few years back)
- > The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible?
It's an interesting conundrum isn't it?
H.P. Lovecraft is a case in point - Lovecraftian horror is a special sort of literary genius, in my opinion, and massively influential on other writers to this day (I'm a big fan of The Laundry Files, for instance, which draw on it). But it's clear that he was massively racist, and significantly more so than just "well those were the times". Some people (some people here in this thread) say that we should "separate the art from the artist", but there's quite a bit of veiled and not-so-veiled racism in the art as well. Not to forget the misogyny.
So we decide to disavow him? No Cthulu for anyone! Well, that doesn't seem like a good option either. There's no easy, feel-good answer here other than to understand that flawed people sometimes create great art, to understand we don't have to (probably shouldn't) make idols of artists, and to be nuanced in our appreciation of their output.
In this vein I did enjoy reading "Lovecraft Country" a while ago, which both explored the horror of racism and embraced mythos-style themes.
Scott Adams gave us Dilbert. In the 90s I found it amazing. By the 00s I'd stopped paying attention, and then he started saying some somewhat less wonderful things which, if you squint, you could see foreshadowed in how uncharitable he was to people in his earlier writings. Another imperfect human, who gave us some good fun and insight, and in the end didn't live up to everyone's expectations. We shouldn't gloss over it, but perhaps we shouldn't pile those expectations on them anyway.
I had a decent lunch at Stacy's that time though...
- This is a little more Lovecraftian Horror than science fiction, but I loved Matt Ruff's "Lovecraft Country". Equal parts what you'd expect, with an exploration of how shitty America was for black people in the 1950s.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25109947-lovecraft-count...
Ted Chiang's "Stories of your Life" have been recommended here a bunch, since Arrival was based on one of the stories in the collection.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_L...
Peter Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia are both excellent explorations of the human mind and consciousness.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490708-echopraxia
Bonus: Echopraxia comes with an optional audiovisual component that stands alone quite well: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL30ED0756E00786E2
And don't let the mention of Vampires scare you off; this isn't a Twilight wannabe, and it's very likely not a take on Vampires you've seen before.
- - A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression
Will most likely end up being the best nonfiction book I've read all year.
Fiction:
- Limbus, Inc. - Book III (I liked I and II better tho)
- Sleeping Giants (Themis Files) - a sleeper recommendation by a coworker that I KNOW will end up as a movie.
- Underground Airlines (Modern day, but the Civil War never happened)
- The Nightmare Stacks (A Laundry Files Novel)
- Lovecraft Country
I read a LOT more than what's listed here, but these are the noteworthy ones. I read a book every couple of days. Lots of military monster-hunting fiction, zombie apocalypse pulp, manly adventure novels, self-help stuff, etc.
- A fictionalised version of this is featured in the (HP inspired) "Lovecraft Country" books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraft_Country_(novel)
I believe there is a TV adaption, but I've not seen it.
- > Plus, homeless people aren’t all older white guys....
> when heroes focus on petty criminals because it encourages the over-policing of impoverished neighborhoods, particularly Black ones....
> United States has “hick” or “white trash” stereotypes ... however, any negative class-based stereotypes also impact them [people of color] a great deal
As a person of colour, I am not a fan of this trope where white writers[1] will make everything even vaguely demeaning about the downtrodden, somehow related to minorities.
All of the examples, given were of white people. Can bad representations of white people not simply remain encapsulated to them?
Saying that everything related to the impoverished must by some means also relate to people of colour is not only clearly wrong, but the classism that the author is ranting against.
Lastly, the author is wrong where she writes
> White supremacists are natural villains but shouldn’t be glorified even a little, which limits their effectiveness as a fictional threat...
The critical success of Lovecraft Country which features villainous racist wizards, puts this to shame, as does the success of Watchmen before it which shed light on the Bombing of Tusla (aka Black Wall Street Massacre) that a whole generation of children likely did not learn about before.
In other examples, comic book villains have historically been associated with America's enemy du'jour. Hydra is no less dramatic or effective in fiction, simply because they are Nazis.
[1] The author, Chris Winkle, is a white woman.
