Lovecraft Country by Matt RuffMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have to say I really enjoyed this book. It's a fine nominee for the World Fantasy Awards. It fits the horror genre well without getting overly gross. Most interesting is the fresh perspective, of having African Americans in the Jim Crow south as protagonists. I don't think it spoils much to say that the very end of the book sums it up perfectly--it's very hard to scare them with supernatural horrors, given the treatment they have received from ordinary humans. The book is a fine sampling of horrors of various kinds, held together most obviously by the theme of race, but also by the notion of the practice of wizardry and witchcraft as some sort of "science". We see that the notion is mostly to make the practitioners feel in control of what they were doing, and they really didn't understand it at all. A fine many-layered book that I think will make a strong showing for an award.
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