https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-7fg78-1ae5478

What happens when you take H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and hand it to the people he feared most?

In Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, the real monsters aren’t lurking in ancient tomes or sunken cities. They’re wearing badges, drawing red lines on maps, and deciding who gets to exist in public after dark.

In this episode, Michael Kilman and Matt Wellstrom dig into Matt Ruff’s genre-bending novel set in 1950s Jim Crow America, where a Black Korean War veteran and his family navigate sundown towns, racist hauntings, shape-shifting elixirs, and a white occultist with questionable motives, all while facing horrors that don’t need magic to be terrifying.

We explore:

• Why H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic dread actually maps more accurately onto the Black experience than onto his own
• How each chapter uses supernatural horror as an allegory for real Jim Crow era injustices including redlining, minstrelsy, and white allyship with strings attached
• The question of whether a white author can write the Black experience with integrity, and what Matt Ruff does right
• Why neutrality is power, and what Ruby’s time as a white woman reveals about race, attractiveness, and privilege
• How the monsters in this book never kill a single Black character

Also featuring tangents on Stephen King, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Colorado Constitution written in three languages, and why racism is always the real monster.

Next episode: Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light

Resistance Reads is a podcast exploring literature, power, and resistance through a social science lens. Hosted by Michael Kilman (Anthropology) and Matt Wellstrom (Political Science).