![]() These stories are a catalog-extensive, but not exhaustive-of the insults, indignities, and violence faced by Black people in America. If “The Call of Cthulhu” features a caricature of Voodoo/Vodou and a terrifying cult statue, then “Horace and the Devil Doll” deals with how caricatures can torment and harm Black people. (Also, “the South will rise again”? How much more Cthulhu-like can you get?) If “The Shadow over Innsmouth” is about the horrors of race-mixing, then “The Narrow House” is its critique, a story about the horrors perpetuated upon those who dared to love and wed outside their race. If you want to see a cult, look at the police departments of certain towns, their sheriffs and deputies willing to sacrifice Black people to their White ideals. He turns the subtext into text, and then gets down to criticising it. Running with the idea that the thing we don’t name or speak about, Whiteness, is something like a cult and something like the magic of a terrible god, Ruff turns Lovecraft on his racist head. That someone, in this case, is Matt Ruff. They tell us what we don’t even know, and when we don’t listen, someone else does. ![]() It certainly wasn’t what Lovecraft meant, since we know full well that Lovecraft was a White supremacist, but that’s the thing about stories. Unspeakable but pervasive, hideously potent, and full of madness, Whiteness seems to come from on high and destroys the other colors of the world. ![]() Sometimes it feels like “The Colour out of Space” that Lovecraft described in his 1927 tale is White. ![]()
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