Lovecraft Country

Lovecraft Country is a 2016 dark fantasy and Black horror novel by the American writer Matt Ruff. It explores the conjunction between the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and racism in the United States under the Jim Crow laws, as experienced by a Black science fiction fan, Atticus Turner, and his family. It was published by HarperCollins.

The cast is a family rather than an individual. Atticus is a Korean War veteran; Montrose is his father; George Berry is his uncle and the husband of Hippolyta; Letitia Dandridge is a friend from his Chicago childhood and Ruby Dandridge is her sister. Samuel Braithwhite is the lodge master at Ardham, and his son Caleb belongs to the same order.

The plot begins as a search. Atticus, George and Letitia drive to New England looking for Montrose and find him held in chains by a secret cabal called the Order of the Ancient Dawn, which has gathered to conduct a ritual centred on Atticus himself. Ruff's device is to place the supernatural threat and the historical one side by side, so that the reader cannot treat either as the real danger.