This book was a finalist for the World Fantasy Awards. It’s a collection of novellas based on the different characters, but it can also be read as a novel. It’s published by HarperCollins and runs 382 pages.
The year is 1954, and African American war veteran Atticus Turner is traveling north to Chicago. His dad Montrose has disappeared somewhere in New England, and with his Uncle George and his friend Letitia, Atticus sets out to find him. They end up at Samuel Braithwhite’s manor, where they learn interesting things about Atticus’ maternal ancestry and encounter Samuel’s son Caleb, who wants to control that legacy. Atticus and his friends soon find themselves dealing with ghosts, warlocks and various arcane events as they’re caught up in the machinations of an ancient cult. Can they save themselves and return to normal lives?
This is an entertaining read, as the characters are all resourceful and end up accomplishing what they need to do through the application of determination and common sense. Regardless of the Jim Crow setting, the characters feel contemporary, as if Ruff has set characters with modern sensibilities into the Lovecraft milieu.
I’ve read some other reviews that promote this book by saying racism is the real horror in the story. I didn’t really see that. If you’re unfamiliar with the facts of Jim Crow segregation and the kind of discrimination African Americans faced in the 1950s, then I suppose this could be a surprise. Presumably Ruff set his story in this period at least partly to display the racial issues, but actually he skims over it as fairly matter-of-fact. Everybody deals and nobody gets lynched.
What really stood out for me instead was the message that these black characters read and treasure the SFF classics of the day by Lovecraft, Burroughs, Bradbury, Asimov, etc., without any disconnect because of their race. Is that so? Currently these writers are all considered to be both racist and sexist because they reflect the attitudes of their era. So, do readers of all races normally transcend racism and sexism to place themselves in a romantic character and a romantic setting? Or is this just an irony that Ruff has inserted in his story? I’d like to hear from people with an opinion.
Four and a half stars.
Lela E. Buis 
Jan 27, 2018 @ 01:18:08
In my experience, readers need their fix and frequently get it from less than pure sources. As we move further in time from the beginnings of genre fiction, people have more choices and I think that’s reflected in eg. kids nowadays hating Lovecraft (one of my all-time favorite authors) for being an especially vile bigot (no argument there – he was not merely “of his time” in his racism and general xenophobia). Sadly, I can’t blame kids today for being repulsed.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 13:16:51
I like the “impure sources” point. Stories are never quite perfect.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 01:22:33
Oh, also, I thought the horror was more in the everyday reality of living with white supremacy. Notice the protagonists were not horrified by the supernatural, but rather dealt with it in a matter-of-fact way, the same way they dealt with the ever-present threat of white mobs or police. Their lack of concern faced with horrors that would destroy a milquetoast Lovecraftian protagonist is subtly horrifying.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 10:21:51
The matter-of-factness was an interesting addition to the story. I thought the result was more humorous and ironic than horrifying, but then, I’m a totally uneducated as a horror fan. I generally have the wrong reaction.
There was a similar treatment of sexism. The men doubt Letita, but she turns out to be the one who saves their necks.
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Pixel Scroll 1/26/18 The Pixel Scroll Shadow Jury | File 770
Jan 27, 2018 @ 03:21:41
Jan 27, 2018 @ 10:39:21
Lela said: “Currently these writers are all considered to be both racist and sexist because they reflect the attitudes of their era.”
Considered to be “racist” by idiots doomed to repeat history. This is fundamentally arrogance. As if the idiots would have done anything differently in that era. People are not fools, generally, they do things for good and obvious reasons. Fools do exist of course, and so we see people calling Asimov a racist.
Lela said: “…these black characters read and treasure the SFF classics of the day…”
Yes, the same as the rest of us did when I was a kid in the 1960s, and for the same reason. The stories take you out of whatever is going on in your life and take you somewhere fantastical. When you read your mind fills with the picture YOU make. In my pictures everyone looks like me. I don’t imagine that changes due to race. This is why books are superior to movies. More enjoyable.
That reality is the truth that makes racism a lie. People are the same, and to pretend otherwise is hellishly stupid. That is one of the fundamentals that the ancient masters wrote into their books, including Lovecraft. That is why calling them racists today, after almost 100 years in some cases, is the work of fools.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 11:53:05
That’s not really true of Lovecraft, though. I’m in the middle of reading my way through his complete works, and some of his stories actually have white-supremacist info dumps. He’s quite explicit that black people are an inferior race. I’ve heard that his racism was an embarrassment to his friends even in his lifetime, so he was over-the-top even in terms of 1920s America.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 12:14:20
I don’t read horror, so I can’t legitimately speak to Lovecraft. I have read Burroughs, Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein, Simak etc, all similarly smeared, so I assume the same for Lovecraft.
I will note that Lovecraft’s work has been around a long time, and nobody made a fuss until a couple years ago. My suspicion is the goalposts were moved by dead of night. Larry Correia is a racist these days too, adding to my suspicions.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 12:49:40
Phantom, I do think Burroughs and Lovecraft fall into a different category. Burroughs was born in 1875 and Lovecraft in 1890. This means they were born into the colonial worldview that labeled native races “inferior” as an excuse to take over their land. Burroughs leans to the “noble savage” viewpoint, but I’ve not read enough of Lovecraft to tell. Since he’s noted as racist and nobody has said a peep about Burroughs, I gather Lovecraft must be pretty bad.
Asimov, Bradbury and Heinlein were all born in the 20th century so have different worldviews. They probably reflect Jim Crow attitudes, but I don’t recall that they dealt with the politics of race and gender at all. That means any racism and sexism you can find in their works is just incidental. They were focused on technology and how this was changing lives post-WWII.
What do you think? Does this cover it?
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 13:46:59
@Lela
“One thing about this, when I was a kid I didn’t really notice racism/sexism at all. I was so caught up in the story that I pretty much accepted the author’s viewpoint as part of the romance of the whole thing. Now when I look back at the same stories, I notice how much the viewpoints are out of sync with current expectations.”
Same here. If it was really bad, ie the virulent racism in some of Lovecraft’s stories, it’d throw me out, but a lot of the more casual, of-its-time racism, misogyny, etc., I just glided over. Those elements tend to pop out more to me now, but that’s because, just as the authors were of their times, I’m of my times, and times are always changing.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 13:28:49
I look at it like this. People in the past were wrong about some things. They were wrong about the Miasma theory of disease. The Germ theory is much more predictive, and allows us to do things like cure tuberculosis.
We however do not understand viruses. All our theories are currently wrong. We can’t cure HIV or the common cold.
In a hundred years, if things continue on, some guy is going to write a book calling us all morons because we couldn’t even cure HIV. That person will be a fool. The “X author was a RACIST!!!” argument is similarly bloody foolishness.
Time marches on. Technologies improve. Customs change. People remain the same. Doing their best with what they’ve got.
Besides, consider the purpose of slandering a -dead- author. It isn’t about the dead guy, its about attacking the people who like those books now. It’s disgusting.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 13:43:37
I don’t think it’s a matter of moving the goalposts; people have always known that older books were full of casual chauvinism and bigotry. The big difference is that people are complaining about it rather than just sighing, “oh well, that’s just how they were in those days.” I suspect the impetus is from a younger generation of readers who have no personal experience of hearing adults being casually racist in their presence.
I’m quite sure Correia has never written anything remotely like the things Lovecraft wrote. Here’s him talking about a black prize fighter who was killed in a fight. Remember that this guy is not one of the monsters; he’s just a regular black guy.
“He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life–but the world holds many ugly things.”
Or a character who had a “wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro blood.”
And, famously, the character with a black cat named Nigger-Man.
I haven’t been marking them as I went along; those are just a few I found doing some quick searches over the text. (I couldn’t find the one I really wanted; the info dump about white supremacy. “Black” just appears too many times to use as a search word.)
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 14:00:06
Greg
“I haven’t been marking them as I went along; those are just a few I found doing some quick searches over the text. (I couldn’t find the one I really wanted; the info dump about white supremacy. “Black” just appears too many times to use as a search word.)”
It’s possible you’re thinking of The Horror at Red Hook, which is a) one of the best Lovecraft stories, b) one of his most nastily racist stories, and c) the basis for Victor Lavalle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom (a re-telling from the perspective of the black people in the story). I assume you know that novella, Greg, just adding the synopsis in case other people haven’t read it.
There’s also this nasty poem Lovecraft wrote. I’d say it goes beyond the casual racism of its time. Apologies for the self-censorship, but I’m not cool with posting such language A few minutes of quiet contemplation should make clear the word behind the dashes 😉 .
“On the Creation of N——
When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a N—–.”
I think we can dispense with accusations of slander against those calling Lovecraft not just racist, not just a white supremacist, but a White Supremacist. Anyone who’s delved into the pulp error of horror/fantasy/sci-fi will know that many writers were not nastily racist in their writings, their times aside.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 14:07:44
Greg, this is simianization, a common type of racism in the 19th century and still popular in certain quarters today. It maintains that Africans are more kin to apes than to white men. Burroughs did this to an extent, too, as he established a hierarchy in Tarzan’s world that included the African Great Apes as a distinct race of people that in some cases intermarried with humans. The whole idea is debunked by modern knowledge about genomes, but the fascination with apes as near human people remains. Isn’t that what King Kong is about? Planet of the Apes?
This same racist philosophy underlies a lot of the justification for US slavery, and underlies cases like the 1857 Dred Scott decision that ruled black Africans could not be US citizens.
P.S. Speaking of genomes, whites turn out to be the ones that are impure. They’ve clearly intermarried with a different species, i.e. Neanderthal.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 15:04:17
In my progression through the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, I just this morning finished Lovecraft’s short novel, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which actually features a positive portrayal of a black family (they’re only minor characters, but even so). The black cat in this story is named “Nig,” which is an improvement over “Nigger-Man,” but not much of one. This story was published just two years after “The Horror at Red Hook,” so I wonder if he got enough heat from his friends that he decided to tone it down a little.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 11:49:04
Even reading Jules Verne won’t get you away from overtly racist material. His “Five Weeks in a Balloon” was the first novel I ever read in French (link is to my description of the experience), and I was shocked at just how racist it was. We’re not talking micro-agressions here! And since it takes place in Africa, you get reminded of it fairly often.
Casual racism was perfectly respectable up until the 1960s. It’s not a surprise we see it a lot in older works. Casual homophobia is less common, if only because the topic was something most people didn’t talk about. (You find a lot of it in hard-boiled detective novels though.) I find I can read and enjoy those stories anyway; the homophobic bits detract from the story for me, but I can usually read past them. I would guess that a lot of black readers feel the same about random racist comments in otherwise-strong works.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 12:30:24
Greg, Jules Verne was born in 1828. He’s definitely a colonialist.
One thing about this, when I was a kid I didn’t really notice racism/sexism at all. I was so caught up in the story that I pretty much accepted the author’s viewpoint as part of the romance of the whole thing. Now when I look back at the same stories, I notice how much the viewpoints are out of sync with current expectations. I’m not sure whether this is the better perception of adulthood or whether it’s just a matter of education.
Recently I have had the opportunity to read works that I think are reverse racist i.e. racist against whites. If I think this is a political statement, then it generally turns me off. However, if it comes across as a genuine minority perspective, I generally enjoy it as part of the worldview of the characters. Could that be a clue?
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 13:49:39
Prejudice against the party in power usually comes across sounding pitiful, so it’s hard to equate the two. Terms like “honky” or “breeder” just sound silly, since they do no actual harm to white or straight people.
I don’t think I’ve read a story that had a noticeable anti-white message, though. (Not that I remember, anyway.) I’d certainly ding it for breaking suspension of disbelief, unless it was the internal thoughts of a character.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 14:16:55
I’ll let you know if I run across a short story. The examples I’m thinking about are novels.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 16:36:40
While we’re talking Verne, his Off On a Comet has a pretty vile Jewish caricature as a villain, something that prompted complaints even when the book was first published. That said, Herbert Lottman discusses the matter in his biography of Verne, and concludes that Verne was just regurgitating a stereotype used by other authors, rather than expressing deeply-held prejudice (he bases this on the absence of any antisemitism in Verne’s personal correspondence).
There’s a difference between writers like Verne or Burroughs who merely fall back on lazy stereotypes, and authors like Lovecraft who write with genuine hatred… although I suppose you could argue that the end result is the same.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 16:43:44
(Also, Burroughs was surprisingly progressive at times…)
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 17:34:46
Do you have the date of this, Doris? His early works are sooo 19th century. That was way before anyone thought of being a SJW.
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Jan 28, 2018 @ 02:43:06
I believe it was the 1920s (the excerpt is from Irwin Porges’ biography, but I can’t find the exact page). I was being a tad facetious when I called him an SJW, but it’s true that he did hold fairly progressive views about race for his time, despite the ugly stereotypes that crop up in his work. If I remember rightly, he wrote his Apache novels because he saw how Native Americans had been misrepresented in fiction and wanted a more positive portrayal, and one of his earliest pieces of writing (a poem called the Black Man’s Burden) was a satitical atack on Rudyard Kipling’s colonialism.
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Jan 28, 2018 @ 05:49:51
Doris, Thanks for checking. I looked around and did find an article online that called Burroughs a racist. Phantom is right to an extent–there’s really no point in rehashing literature by dead authors looking for social justice issues to complain about. Certainly they’re not here to apologize and revise the works. That makes is mostly about the complainer trying to smear their reputation and advertise a cause.
I like Ruff and LaValle’s approach better. Just write your own answer.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 21:37:56
To be clear, I’m not aware of any particular *racism* issues regarding Asimov, aside from his comment to Delaney (which, as I understand, Delaney accepted as a poor attempt at a joke).
Asimov and *sexism*, however, is another issue entirely.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 22:07:03
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl
Heinlein, not a fascist. They smeared him anyway. I take comfort in how much money they lost doing it.
Talking about Asimov and sexism, same thing. The name Dr. Susan Calvin ring a bell?
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 22:37:17
@Phantom – The Asimov sexism thing isn’t about his writings. He’s infamous within the SF world for being an unrepentant groper.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 23:16:39
We are speaking about books. His -books- are not sexist, except in the minds of activists.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 23:27:49
The minds of activists? You always have a unique take on things. It’s possible Greg was referring to Asimov’s writing. It’s been a long time since I’ve re-read Asimov. I don’t recall anything worse than what you’d expect from a man of his time in his writings.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 23:32:16
Groping isn’t exactly sexism, is it? Sexism is prejudice and discrimination.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 23:40:38
Hmm… Yeah, I guess groping is literally physical assault. But why did he grope? And why was it women who he chose to grope? What made him want to grope women, and feel empowered to do so? I guess we can never be entirely sure, any more than we can be sure that we aren’t just brains in a jar.
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Jan 27, 2018 @ 23:48:26
Beats me. There are some fairly obvious possibilities, though. We need a psychologist to check in and analyze it for us.
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Jan 28, 2018 @ 19:08:39
Kathodus said: “I guess we can never be entirely sure, any more than we can be sure that we aren’t just brains in a jar.”
Failure to accept the universe as objectively real is a mental illness, and a lot of it is going around these days. Thanks, Post Modernism.
Generally my disproof of this idiocy is grabbing the person’s nose. Since I’m not there, if you go and bang your head against the wall, that will be incontrovertible evidence that you are not a brain in a jar.
There are also “granularity” arguments that disprove the Matrix hypothesis, the world is too finely granular for a Turing machine to model in the time available.
This is why I like to confine my comments to the book. If you can get sexism out of I, Robot then you can get it out of a phone book too. Or a potato.
Kathodus said: “The minds of activists? You always have a unique take on things.”
Normal, run-of-the-mill fans and authors are not driving the Outrage Train. That is the province of a very few, very loud individuals intent on a political end. Activists. Did the rank-and-file of the horror book club rise up in anger a couple of years ago and demand Lovecraft’s likeness be removed from the prize, or whatever it was? No, they did not. Activists created an uproar and demanded it. Members voted, after a very acrimonious campaign as I recall.
Likewise, Asimov’s books are sexist only in the minds of a few demented activists, desperately hunting for something new to be outraged about this week.
I don’t think that’s a unique take. I see it all the time. Not very many people support the trashing of dead men’s work, and those who do are becoming increasingly unpopular.
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Jan 28, 2018 @ 19:31:30
Phantom – Lela and I were discussing Asimov’s well-documented habit of groping women. Lela isn’t sure sexism was involved. I very strongly suspect it was, but acknowledge that without direct access to Asimov’s internal thought process, we cannot be certain.
I’ve never considered the brain in a jar thing as anything more than a thought experiment. I can’t speak for anyone else. I’ll leave that to you, as you seem fond of speaking for those you consider your opponents.
Regarding the “activists” thing – yeah, I guess you could call that activism. Seems more like internicine squabbling to me. Activists generally risk incarceration.
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