Lovecraft Country and The Destroyer of Worlds

Lovecraft Country

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by David Palumbo.

Lovecraft Country… You won’t find it on any map. It has no fixed geographical coordinates, and you can’t measure the distance to it, even in Jim Crow Miles. You’ll look in vain for references to it in any book of travel. But rest assured, should you end up in Lovecraft Country—you’ll know it.

Just ask Korean War veteran Atticus Turner, who returns home to Chicago in the summer of 1954 to find that his father, Montrose, has gone missing. The only clue to his whereabouts is a letter in which Montrose claims to have uncovered a mysterious family legacy in Arkham, Massachusetts—a town that Atticus, a fan of weird tales, knows is fictional. Or is it?

Accompanied by his uncle George, publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, and his friend Letitia, Atticus sets out on a cross-country journey that leads to the estate of Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb, whose family once owned one of Atticus’s ancestors. The Braithwhites head the Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn, a sorcerer’s cabal that requires Atticus’s participation in a dangerous ritual. And that is only the beginning. Soon Atticus and his family and friends are embroiled in a series of uncanny escapades that include confronting a haunted house’s ghost, retrieving an ancient book of esoteric wisdom from its secret hiding place, traveling to a realm beyond space and time, and undergoing a personal transformation that’s as startling as it is impossible. All are milestones that mark the unplanned detour that Atticus and his loved ones are forced to make into Lovecraft Country.

In Lovecraft Country, the inspiration for the hit HBO series, Matt Ruff manages the remarkable feat of evoking otherworldly horrors redolent of the work of H. P. Lovecraft and refracting them through America’s long history of troubled race relations. Although rich with with references to its namesake and the fiction on which he left his indelible imprint, this novel is even more memorable for its elaboration of a world in which horrors both inhuman and all-too-human intersect with a terrifying intensity.

The Destroyer of Worlds -
A Return to Lovecraft Country

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by David Palumbo.

In his novel Lovecraft Country, the basis for the celebrated HBO series, Matt Ruff introduced us to the Turners, a black family living in 1950s Chicago, and their twin struggles against the occult Order of the Ancient Dawn and the more mundane terrors of Jim Crow-era racism. Now, in The Destroyer of Worlds, Ruff continues the story and explores the meaning of death, the hold of the past on the present, and the power of hope in the face of uncertainty.

It is the summer of 1957. Korean War veteran Atticus Turner and his father, Montrose, travel to North Carolina to retrace their ancestor’s escape from slavery into the Great Dismal Swamp. But an encounter with an old nemesis turns their historical renactment into a life-and-death pursuit.

Back in Chicago, Atticus’s uncle George fights for his own life. Diagnosed with cancer, he strikes a devil’s bargain with the ghost of Hiram Winthrop, who promises a miracle cure—but to receive it, George will first have to bring Winthrop back from the dead.

Meanwhile, Atticus’s fifteen-year-old cousin Horace, reeling from the killing of a close friend, joins his mother, Hippolyta, and her friend Letitia Dandridge on a research trip to Nevada for The Safe Negro Travel Guide. But Hippolyta has a secret—and far more dangerous—agenda that will take her and Horace to the far end of the universe and bring a new threat home to Letitia’s doorstep.

Hippolyta isn’t the only one keeping secrets. Letitia’s sister, Ruby, has been leading a double life as her white alter ego, Hillary Hyde. Now, the supply of magic potion she needs to transform herself is running out, and a surprise visitor throws her already tenuous situation into complete chaos.

All these troubles are eclipsed by the return of Caleb Braithwhite. Stripped of his magic at the end of Lovecraft Country, he’s found a way back into power and is ready to pick up where he left off. But first he’s got a score to settle…

Features Include:

• Oversized 7 x 10 trim size
• Printed on 70# Finch in two colors
• Interior design with two columns per page, in homage to the pulps
• A Full-color wraparound dust jacket
• Black-and-white endsheet illustration
• Nine interior black-and-white illustrations

Limited: 400 signed numbered hardcover copies

Lettered: 26 signed copies, specially bound, housed in a custom traycase