Welcome to Lovecraft Country, where cosmic horror is a white people problem

Books, comics, TV, music
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In Lovecraft Country, being called a nigger, refused service at a restaurant, harassed by the police, or treated with contempt by an elite coven of warlocks is just another day. This cast of black characters living in Chicago in 1954 is accustomed to America. They have learned to navigate it. Literally. One of the main characters publishes a travel guide called The Safe Negro Travel Guide. It steers black people around — or, if necessary, through — the more virulent racism in America, especially where Jim Crow laws are still in effect. Which restaurants will serve black customers? Which highways should you not be on after dark? Which garages can you call if your car breaks down? So the characters in Lovecraft Country don’t seem terribly surprised by the idea that maybe the universe is a vast and ancient expanse of indifference at best, outright hostility at worst. Why would someone go insane from learning what minorities know every day? If you look into the abyss long enough, you still have to ride in the back of the bus on your way to work.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2017/09/12/welcome-lovecraft-country-cosmic-horror-white-people-problem/
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I’ve got this in my to-read pile. I’m moving it up to be next.

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That was a great essay, Tom. Thank you.

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I loved Lovecraft Country, for a lot of the reasons mentioned here. But also the fact that Lovecraft himself was virulently racist and so I appreciate the way Lovecraft Country offers the concepts that are so compelling about Lovecraft’s work but centers racism as one of the horrors instead of baking it into the assumptions of the narration.

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What the hell? Cosmic horror set against a Jim Crow south? That’s nuts! I need to know more!

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Where’s the Facebook Like button? Oh yeah, it’s the one up there in the right corner that says “Donate”.

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Tom, I would love to get into a constructive argument about the parts of Get Out that you didn’t like, as I think that the TSA character and his story is the absolute most important thing in the film. His stereotypical fear of white folks, while comedic, ended up being correct! The whole movie he is the one I think it was purposely written the way it was not as some crutch of “sketch comedy” to fall back on, but to serve as something to change the tone of the film to the viewer. To keep us guessing as to what could happen. Could this be a comedy? Could there be fun hijinks? And when the movie turns dark, I think it hits you harder because of this.

I also think that having the cop car show up at the end, with Chris standing over the corpse of Rose (I think she was dead… or near dead) was one of the best moments of the film. I think everyone went to that dark cynical place that we thought the film was going to go. To only have Rod pop out of the car was such a joyous payoff to that entire storyline.

I think that your take of that character “shuckin’ and jivin” is very misaligned with the importance of that character to the tone of the film, and does a disservice to the craft of film overall. To make it a retelling of a body-snatchers or stepford wives esque tale would make a boring movie. This film was very Jordan Peele, and that is why it was so great.

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That was an excellent essay, thanks. And it made me decide not to read Lovecraft Country, because I’m all outta optimism.

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I really liked Lovecraft Country a lot. I fell in love with the H.P. Lovercraft in my teens and gobbled up everything in the mythos, including playing a lot of Call of Cthulhu back in the day. It was only when I got older that I had to confront the fact that ol’ Howard Phillips was a racist. And not just in a he-was-a-product-of-his-time way. He was crazy xenophobic and bigoted, which informed a lot of his work that I so dearly loved. That was a tough realization with which I had to come to terms.

I continued to enjoy Lovecraft and all his eldritch horrors, but knowing what I knew of his feelings so openly stated in many a letter, made it a lot harder to not give stories like The Rats in the Walls or even Call of Cthulhu itself a bit of the side-eye. (The less said about his really brazen racism, the better.) Over the years I’ve come to an uneasy peace with Lovecraft and Lovecraft Country helped a lot.

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Oh, man, I didn’t even think of that. Great point, malk! Interestingly enough, the characters in the book actually talk about Lovecraft. Approvingly. One of the things that Ruff does with his characters is draw points of commonality to dorks like us who like Lovecraft, videogames, superheroes, and so forth. A child’s home-made comic books are even a significant plot point.

That was very cool of you, Roger! Thank you so much!

Interesting thesis, but he strikes me as a pretty ancillary character, not to mention a broad stereotype. He’s the best friend, the external watcher/rescuer (“the call is coming from inside the house!”), the Cassandra, the clown, and so on. It seems pretty dismissive of all the other stuff the script and actors were doing to single him out as the “absolute most important thing in the film”, but it depends on what you value in the movie.

[quote=“JonRowe, post:7, topic:131551, full:true”]
I think it was purposely written the way it was not as some crutch of “sketch comedy” to fall back on, but to serve as something to change the tone of the film to the viewer.

[quote]

Oh, I don’t doubt it was intentional! But not all tone shifts are effective. The character is obviously imported from the sense of humor Peele shows in his sketches, in Keanu, and so forth. It’s certainly not what you expect in a horror movie about paranoia and suspicion. The question is whether it works and it doesn’t for me. But as I wrote about Lovecraft Country, there’s room in the juxtaposition of horror and racism to introduce the kind of optimism and levity that don’t work in cosmic horror. See John Dies in the End. By which I mean, don’t see it, it’s a smug misguided trainwreck.

I don’t know what it says about me and/or Key and Peele, but a lot of their humor uncomfortably reminds me of minstrel shows. I don’t think they would mind that observation, and I suspect they might argue they’re reclaiming it. Which is fine, but it still doesn’t work for me.

Did you read Lovecraft Country, by the way? I bet you’d dig it.

-Tom

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Yikes. I’m happy to say I’d never seen that before.

-Tom

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Not sure if it was intentional Tom, but Wilbur Whately very pointedly was not allowed to check out a book because of his class and appearance.

Also most if not all of the super racist stuff from HPL was from his early days. Lovecraft, while still seemingly not fond of non-whites, later in life repudiated many of the social and racial views he had expressed in an earlier essay. Lovecraft essentially went from being absurdly racist and xenophobic to a level more in line with what would be “normal” racism of the late 30’s. So still awful but not the This sounds worse than Hitler stuff of his youth.

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Not intentional at all, jasop! I was just reeling off Lovecraft characters and I presumed Whateley was a good ol’ boy farmer. I guess I need to read Dunwich Horror again. Thanks so much for pointing that out.

-Tom

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He definitely got less fanatical about it as he got older, and tempered some of his xenophobia into general misanthropy.

By the way, if you liked Lovecraft Country, another book that I think tweaked Lovecraft’s own peccadilloes with eugenics and racism is Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism from David Nickle.

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1926851110/

I don’t think it’s as well-written as Lovecraft Country, but it has its own charms.

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Have not, but it is now on my reading list.

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The Negro Motorist Green Book was a real thing!

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Only $0.99 on the Kindle store now too.

https://smile.amazon.com/Lovecraft-Country-Novel-Matt-Ruff-ebook/dp/B00UG61LNS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505336067&sr=8-1&keywords=lovecraft+country

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Awesome deal, thanks! Been meaning to pick this up since I heard of it via the TV show deal, and Tom’s review just hammered that home.