Eutopia a novel of terrible optimism series#

Mexican-Canadian author and editor Silvia Moreno Garcia has long taken an interest in Lovecraft’s uglier and more problematic anxieties. Related: 11+ Horror Movies You Need to See, According to Jordan Peele What it is, is a portrait of a writer terrified not only of the other, but finally of everything beyond his dark and musty rooms. Nick Mamatas, who has hybridized Lovecraftian fiction with various forms-including a just re-released version of Move Underground, which brings the beat-generation icon Jack Kerouac into the Lovecraftian mythos-took on Lovecraftian fandom in his satirical murder mystery I Am Providence, set among Lovecraft fans and authors at a fictionalized convention in Lovecraft’s home-town of Providence, Rhode Island.Ĭanadian author Jacqueline Baker’s The Broken Hours offers a similarly pseudo-realist take on Lovecraft, but to say the slow-burn story of Lovecraft’s fictional personal secretary Arthor Crandall in the twilight of the author’s life is entirely without supernatural elements would be inaccurate. In his short novel Cold Skin, Catalan author Albert Sanchez Pinol takes a postcolonial critique to the Lovecraftian original, telling the tale of two European men on a weather station/lighthouse near Antarctica, battling a similarly-described species of amphibious bipeds, and eventually capturing one of them and keeping her as a sex slave. Lovecraft’s own novella “A Shadow Over Innsmouth” is less explicitly racist than “Red Hook”-but it is nevertheless a horror story of miscegenation, focusing on the degradation of cross-species inter-breeding between the people in the eponymous New England fishing village and Deep Ones, a malevolent race of humanoid fish creatures. Related: 14 Dark and Twisted Cult Horror Movies You Need to See Lovecraft’s most openly racist works, “The Horror at Red Hook.” Told in part from the point of view of Charles Thomas Tester, a Black musician and hustler eking out a living in Jazz Age Harlem, the story deliciously subverts the story’s implicit white supremacy, and so reclaims it. Black American writer LaValle’s novella is a reworking of one of H.P.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle is probably along with Lovecraft Country the best-known from this set. The racist and ableist pseudoscience of eugenics was something I saw as implicit in many of Lovecraft’s work-and as with the explicitly racist treatment of the Black citizens of mid-20th-century America that provide the real-world horror in Ruff’s novel, Lovecraft did not treat eugenics as an implicit horror, but rather the opposite.

Related: 13 Must-Read Horror Books by Diverse Authors When I started work on Eutopia in the early 2000s, I drew inspiration at once from Lovecraft’s alien and indifferent pantheon of god-like creatures, and the intersection of his more racist ideas with the American eugenics movement that grew contemporaneously with him. My own books, Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism and its sequel Volk: A Novel of Radiant Abomination, I wrote with this ambition top of mind. Lovecraft Country is one of a small legion of works that have emerged over the past few decades that interrogate Lovecraft’s prejudices at the same time they celebrate his aesthetic. For a long time, it was (in my personal experience of genre discourse at any rate) all but impossible to talk about.Īnd that is what is so satisfying in seeing Ruff’s book adapted for the screen. That racism is ever-present in Lovecraft’s very influential work and has been an embarrassment to many keepers of his legacy. In Lovecraft Country, the characters face both kinds of horrors: a society of powerful and corrupt sorcerers who bend reality to admit alien monstrosities, and the more mundane horror of Jim-Crow-era anti-Black racism as it manifested in everyday reality.

Eutopia a novel of terrible optimism series#

Related: Everything We Know About the HBO Horror Series Lovecraft Country

He is also a fan of pulpy science fiction and horror-and so knows his way around both the horrors that Lovecraft both dreamed up in his Cthulhu mythos, and the racism and xenophobia that poisoned Lovecraft’s work and letters. It’s the story of Black Korean War veteran Atticus Turner and his circle of family and friends, all attempting to survive and occasionally thrive in the very white world of 1950s America. Lovecraft Country is an adaptation of Matt Ruff’s 2017 novel of the same name. The story is a continuation of a conversation that has been going on in the Lovecraftian weird fiction community-often quite heatedly-for many years. This is not to say the new HBO series from Misha Green will please all of Lovecraft’s acolytes. Lovecraft Country is sure to make a certain kind of H.P.