Lovecraft Country

White people in his experience were far more transparent. The most hateful rarely bothered to conceal their hostility, and when for some reason they did try to hide their feelings, they generally exhibited all the guile of five-year-olds, who cannot imagine that the world sees them other than as they wish to be seen.

I will say one thing: this was certainly an ambitious book that tried to do a lot of different things at once. Unfortunately I find myself walking away from this one feeling like it became a victim of those very ambitions. I don't say this often, but I truly think this book would have benefited from being longer than it was.

Multiple reviews of this book - even the ones printed on the very first page before you get to the content itself - described this one as "fast-paced" or using a similar buzzword, so I at least had that expectation going into it. The way the book is structured there aren't formal chapters in the traditional sense, but more like big chunks of narrative that take turns following different characters as the story progressed. Nothing I haven't seen before, but what I took issue with was how much time was devoted to each of these mini-arcs. Each one had an interesting enough premise to hold up as a short story or even novella in its own right, but just as I felt like I was getting into the groove of things that section of the story would end and we'd be abruptly shuffled along to a new character and conflict. More than once I wanted to go back to what was happening a few paragraphs earlier and explore that setting more, but the plot demanded we continue in a new direction instead.

This book also frequently comes up in Horror recommendation lists, which I suppose is the genre I would put it under if I had to choose one, though I'd be second-guessing myself if I did. There was a heavy theme of occultism and secret societies throughout most of the vignettes and more than one deus ex machina courtesy of some paranormal something-or-other lurking in the shadows, but the only times I felt afraid for the all-black cast of protagonists was when a white man entered the scene, which unfortunately is more mundane than outright spooky.

For context, the story takes place in the Jim Crow South as well as Chicago in the 1950's, just after the Korean War. Obviously you don't have to be someone who lived through that era to know that race relations weren't the greatest, but I didn't feel like this book handled that fact very well. When literally every encounter with a white man quickly escalates into a near-death experience for one of the protagonists over the slightest fabricated transgressions, it reads less like an condemnation of the past and more like a parody of it. Realism takes a back seat to dramatic story-telling and I feel like an honest depiction of the era suffers for it. What could have been a subtle narrative device to introduce ambiguity to a white character's true intentions towards a protagonist instead becomes an immediate red flag for the sake of a cheap thrill.

That said, the main cast of characters were certainly likeable and distinct enough from each other that I never had trouble remembering who was who, but at times it did feel like I was being forced to juggle more threads than were necessary for less time than I wanted to.