Abstract
James Kneale examines a subject that has become increasingly central to critical work on the weird: H. P. Lovecraft’s explicit racism. In recent years a number of Lovecraftian stories have entered into critical dialogues with Lovecraft, including Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country. These novels illustrate the ways in which racism makes ordinary places weird or eerie, threatening the mobility and security of their African-American protagonists, deforming their experience of space and time. Ruff and Lavalle present us with the horrors of white America, forcing us to ask whether the cosmic indifference which is so central to Lovecraft’s work affects us equally. In doing so they offer us new insights into the intersections between geography, racism, and the weird.
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Kneale, J. (2019). “Indifference Would Be Such a Relief”: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff’s Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft. In: Greve, J., Zappe, F. (eds) Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28116-8_7
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