Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Horror novels are a difficult thing to write. You have to ebb and flow with the fear as a story builds and characters develop. Too much one way and it devolves into a jumbled mess of a thriller. Too much the other and it isn't scary or particularly interesting....at least to me. That balance is hard to strike and even harder to maintain for a long work. (Side Note: This is another reason Stephen King's career and corpus is remarkable, but I digress.)

One of the ways to short-circuit the problem of balancing a long-form horror story is to completely sidestep the problem and write short stories instead! Some of the best and most notable examples of the genre take this exact strategy. Poe, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, the aforementioned King, and also notably the titular figure of this book, H.P. Lovecraft.

Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country wondrously stitches a series of short-stories together into a connected narrative creating an entire shared universe of character and settings in just one book. It's a remarkable read. He achieves this by borrowing themes and tropes from throughout the cosmic horror genre, but still manages to make Lovecraft Country feel distinct while remaining familiar.

Some stories lean more towards the horror side while others slide towards the cosmic side of early Twentieth Century pulp-speculative fantasy. Any of these stories would have been great additions to Weird Tales.....other than for the fact that since the main characters are black, none of these would probably have seen the light of day back in the 30s or 40s. Confronting the racism of Jim Crow America, and today, through the lens of a genre that has too often overlooked and marginalized people of color is a powerful example of how fiction can help you understand better the life of another person. If sometimes it takes a shoggoth to help the medicine go down, then so be it.