The History behind Lovecraft Country
Both Victor LaValle’s the Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff’s novel came out on the same day.
Sometime around 2016, Matt Ruff’s agent contacted him, stating the Jordan Peele was interested in adapting Lovecraft Country. The writer was taken aback, for he knew of Peele’s work as a comedian. See, Get Out hadn’t even been announced at the time. It’s when Misha Green showed interest that Ruff really began to hope, mainly because he had loved Green’s Underground. After those two phone calls, even though lots of other companies were interested, Ruff said he knew he had made the good choice. A thought late confirmed by Get Out first trailer, through which Ruff saw a modern retelling of what he had intended to do. A movie, he would say to you, is probably one of the most important of the 2010s.
Last Sunday, the series’ first episode released to critical acclaim but see, as anyone would put it, Lovecraft Country didn’t begin there. As is common with good fiction, its maturation took a long while.
Listen to a sufficient number of interviews given by Matt Ruff and you will certainly find that he was born and raised in a household full of debate, argumentation and judgement. Be it on politics or more simply on religion. According to him, this is what taught us, from a very young age that people can have differing opinion, on which they may never agree and that was fine.
In a shorter Q&A, Ruff may explain that most of what Lovecraft Country would become came from to precise instant. First in 2006, Pam Noles released Shame, an essay about her experience with loving science-fiction while growing up as an Afro-American. This affected profoundly Ruff, for at the time he was reading James Loewen’s Sundown Towns, an essay about American town in which Coloured People were banned after sundown. Both those ideas collided in the writer’s head but it’s a past experience, from Ruff’s past in Cornell which really got his gears turning. See, when he was in university, the white student that he was at the time used to take hike through the countryside. One day, Ruff said to one of his black friend that maybe he should come around sometime, to which the Afro-American responded: You know I can’t do this, right? I go around on a hike in the country, I might not make it to graduation. Ruff was startled, like, he saw where this was going but his first reaction was: But this ain’t the South. Joe, his childhood friend answered: I know, Matt, we’re up North.
This idea comes on a lot through all of Ruff’s interview, this shock he had, realizing his friend and him didn’t leave in the same space. In a way, Joe was living in Lovecraft Country, an environment Matt Ruff would never experience. It all came back to it, reading Sundown Towns, when a mention in passing, taught him of the existence of The Negro Motorist Green Book. There used to be a point in time when life for Afro-American, and Jews before that, was so hard, they had to find systemic solution to this, they had to find a safe way to just travel.
In 2007, Matt Ruff who had always been a professional writer, his last normal job having been being a barista, got an appointment with Fox executives who wanted him to pitch them tv show ideas he had. Ruff knew post 9/11 America might have not been ready for the Mirage, a dystopian universe in which Saudi Arabia was running the US as a colony, but he could still try to sell Lovecraft Country. Plot was simple, imagine a X-Files sort of series, but following black folks through the 50s, writing their travel guide referencing all non-prejudice enterprise and encountering the ordinary racism and monsters. Ruff wanted his protagonist to be nerds, he wanted to address the problem of black nerds which Pam Noles spoke about, but he also saw this as a mechanism which would help further the story. You see, nerds when facing a ghoul, banshee or ghost tend to know exactly what they have to do, they might not be as surprised as others; on the other hand, having characters which would face discrimination made theme always have to walk forward. The subtle recipe seemed genius.
Fox declined both ideas. Listening to Ruff, you might get that he kind of understood when execs were like: You really want people to sit for one hour each week to be taught about the horror of mundane racism? Gleefully, he might admit that he’s not the best pitcher, what with being an introvert and all, but he would still admit that maybe 2007 just wasn’t the time for this.
Much like Jeff Lindsay had to do it with his idea of Johnny Depp portraying his Dexter character, Matt Ruff put his concept under his arm, wrote a novel. And the idea stuck with him. So much so that before getting into the whole movie, he wrote the beginning of it for a residence at the Hugo House.
He knew he wanted this to be a series, and that’s why he wrote it as a series, a novel-in-stories as he put it. With each story being different episodes. Some of them existing mostly because he wanted to tackle horror clichés, put black characters in mainly white story. Other had to look like the conspiration arc in the X-Files, the main plot. While handing his copy of the Mirage to his editor. Ruff asked him if he thought a novel-in-stories would be a good idea, for everyone seems to hate this. Still, deep down he knew his decision was already taken.
Matt Ruff settled in his office and began to write. I think he asked his researcher’s wife to dig him up a few hidden documentations, but Ruff was on a mission. For black nerds. To Ruff, Lovecraft was just a bridge, between cosmic horror and white supremacy.
Any honest reader will tell you so, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a racist and an anti-Semite. People already fought about this. Still, on the 3rd of March 1928, he would marry Sonia Greene, ten years his senior, a Russian immigrant of Jewish ascent. Lovecraft had met his future wife in 1921 through a Press Convention and as was his habit, they wrote to one another pretty extensively. Their romance debuted in 1922 and ended in 1926
But Greene lived in New-York, while at first, she paid the travelling fees for her soon-to-be husband, she finally got him to move in the City when they got married. This would strain her relationship with her own daughter but still. The couple seemed pretty happy, even though, the multiculturalism of the Big Apple appeared to be a stress upon the person of Lovecraft. I won’t recite every little thing Lovecraft said about aliens, immigrants or what he deemed non-Aryans. Simply know that while his wife was a Jew and reminded him of this pretty often, when she decided they should throw parties, he asked her that the Semitics ratio be lower than those of Whites during such events.
It’s pretty clear, Lovecraft did have problems with those he considered aliens, which can be seen as even more weird when you notice the number of Jewish writers he tended to help and consider as friends along his career. Still, his view on non-Celtic or non-Whites, coupled with the stress of actually having to deal with them on a daily basis led to the creation of the now infamous Horror at Red Hook.
This precise short story appears to be halfway between the novice Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos. If you support its racial views and foul implications, you may glimpse during the end, a sort of foreshadowing of why Lovecraft would go on to be a master but for this to happen, you have to sit through a police story riddled with prejudice. Embarking on this journey is a reader’s choice. It’s a known fact that Lovecraft intended to sell this story to a police fiction magazine but due to refusal had to publish it in the page of Weird Tales. The tale came out in the January of 1927 issue of Weird Tales and is what it is. The story of a police officer named Malone discovering a sombre cult led by a white man, Suydam, lies underneath Red Hook.
Read a few interview of Victor LaValle and you’ll learn that, as a young boy born in Queens, LaValle discovered literature through horror. Mainly Lovecraft, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Shirley Jackson. Push enough and he might add a few names. His love for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster is also notorious. Victor LaValle will tell you that he discovered Lovecraft through a book whom cover was of a skeleton monk. As a boy trying to get the whole world picture, the cosmic dread of Lovecraft, his fear of this indifferent universe fascinated him. Age 16, LaValle began to notice problems through Lovecraft’s prose even though he would gladly admit he didn’t stop reading him just for this. Just know Victor LaValle grew up to become a teacher at Columbia University School of Arts. He published his first book talking about his upbringing in Queens before he slowly turned to horror.
In the early summer of 2015, LaValle had just finished writing The Changeling when he decided he had enough in the tank to write something else. Funnily enough, this is exactly how Stephen King wrote every novella contained in Different Seasons, from this feeling of having all your muscles still tense, this knowing you could write something more. Maybe not a whole book but a novella. In this heightened state, LaValle grabbed a copy of a Lovecraftian collection and re-read Horror at Red Hook. According to him, news at the time were filled with black people being murdered in the streets by police and that’s when he noticed. Victor LaValle noticed Horror at Red Hook wasn’t a good story in and of itself, but mainly because of Lovecraft’s racism. In this particular short tale, Lovecraft had chosen a white protagonist, completely lost in a culturally-mixed neighbourhood he knew nothing about. This made the book a disservice. In a way, Red Hook ended up being not as scary as Lovecraft had thought, because, in a way, he was talking about something he genuinely didn’t understand and that’s when it hit LaValle. Could he rewrite Horror at Red Hook through the prism of a black protagonist? After all, the writer still wanted to produce something, he knew he can. Victor LaValle knew he could inject complexity into Lovecraft’s story.
LaValle’s take was simple, in a way The Ballad of Black Tom would let him explain a world Lovecraft could not. To write his novella, the writer read Wide Sargasso by Jean Rhys and Train Dream by Denis Johnson. Those books helped LaValle settle the style he’d get for his own book. You see, according to LaValle, people who wants to reference Lovecraft often fall into the trap of trying to copy his style, Lovecraft’s archaic over worded prose. Not to mess up, LaValle even cut back on his own prose, trying to just convey enough, without vision, or poetry or dense word assembly so as not being criticize. In an interview LaValle stated this was strangely liberating. Still, he wanted the book to be an accurate representation of the New-York of the time. To this end, he used heavily the website digitalharlem.com which helped him a great deal and even taught him of the Victory Club which was just a diner in his first draft. LaValle wanted to speak of the way black people moved through the streets at the time, of their attitudes and situations which could befell upon them, this made the story more complex. I’ve seen LaValle stating the Ballad of Black Tom was a counter manifesto, saying that Lovecraft’s ideology was pretty much put down openly in this precise story, so LaValle could do the same. An answer to Lovecraft’s fear of extinction 88 years later.
The Ballad of Black Tom centers on Charles Thomas Tester, a black hustler who buys and sells arcane books. It’s his meeting with Suydam, mixed with the death of his father at the hand New-York’s police force, which will propel the young man from Queens from the position of bad street musician to right-hand of a secret cult. With this, LaValle hopes to explore Malone’s latent racism and explore Lovecraft’s own flaws which he stubbornly put on the shoulder of its protagonist.
The novella was good enough that it got optioned by AMC, who asked LaValle to write them a grand total of ten episodes before they’d decide if they wanted to really go through with the adaptation. I’ve heard LaValle stating he himself was amazed by their offer, and the triumphant announcement they made back in 2017. This is now 2020 and no Ballad of Black Tom tv series appears on the horizon but it furthers the parallel you can draw to Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country.
See, while Ruff was putting the final touches to Lovecraft Country, he heard of a rumour about an upcoming novella which would retell one of Lovecraft’s tale but from the perspective of black man. If you dig enough, you may find a couple of interviews where they’re seated together, actually stating they enjoyed each other’s stuff enough. Dig a little deeper and you’ll notice both were raised in New-York and studied in Cornell.
Maybe that’s all there is to it. Lovecraft was LaValle’s idol, not Matt Ruff’s. Still, both decided to tackle the same subject at approximatively the same time, in part showing that no creation gets made through a void.
If you still want to read about horror books, don’t forget to read The Three Dark Princes of German Horror and if you decide you like tv series origins you might be interested by the Snowpiercer Saga.
The fourth Friday of the month is dedicated to short stories so I’ll release a flash fiction named Eggshell. Hope you like it!
