Year 4, week 15: Lovecraft Country

This week's book:
Lovecraft Country
By Matt Ruff 

This week's book the hubby and I read together while I nursed the baby. We had seen a commercial for it on HBO and the plot looked intriguing. I didn’t know anything about the novels of H.P. Lovecraft, but my husband is more into science fiction than I am so I thought he might get a kick out of the novel as well. 

The novel is a mix of sci-fi and horror as it dives into Jim Crow era racism throughout America. The book is broken into different sections about different characters' stories, kind ok like little vignettes if you will. If I had been thinking I should have stopped us after each “story” and had us write about it, but I just didn't think of it. Due to our two older children NEVER wanting to go to sleep it took us quite a bit longer to read the book, but we finally finished it. 

I am going to be honest here, I sometimes struggle with trying to understand/see what is going on sometimes in sci-fi or fantasy novels. I don't know if my brain just doesn't understand what the author is explaining or those types of ideas aren’t at the ready when I am trying to imagine the plot in my head. I have been dying to watch the show and I'm sure I will enjoy it, and finally see what I was missing when the Hubs was reading the book to the babe and I. 

P.S. The hubs and I "watched" the show. I say "watched" because I kept falling asleep. When I wasn't falling asleep I was confused as all get out. The show was just different enough from the book that I didn't know what was going on. I have to say it was a hard pass for the book and show.

Notes from the Hubby: I thoroughly enjoyed the book myself. The novel takes place in the early 1950s and follows Atticus Turner, a young Korean War veteran and avid science-fiction reader, as well as his family and close friends. Each of the novel's short stories centers around a different character, with the final chapter bringing everyone together for the big finale.

Each story focuses on a character and their interactions with a group of mysterious sorcerers called The Order of the Ancient Dawn. Every story explores a different sci-fi or horror theme (mysterious deadly creatures, a haunted house, a heist for an artifact locked in a museum, a strange portal to other worlds, a Jekyll & Hyde style body transformation, contact with ghosts, a magical curse, and a ritual to grant immortality). Each of these sci-fi/horror themes are intertwined with the Jim Crow racism common during the era.

After finishing the novel, we binged through the HBO series based on it. The show definitely had its moments, but overall I liked the book better. I really liked the first few episodes, and a couple others here and there, but there were several changes from the book that I just didn't like: character deaths, some real WTF moments that were introduced, and a few scenes I was looking forward to seeing on TV that were completely changed.