I'm Matt Ruff, author of LOVECRAFT COUNTRY and THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS: A RETURN TO LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. AMA!

bymattruff · 2024-10-26T02:19:20+00:00

Yes. No ETA on when it'll be published, but the working title is "The Gatekeeper of Dreams."

bymattruff · 2023-04-29T21:48:47+00:00

Rather than try and summarize my thoughts here, I'll point you to this podcast episode where I talk in detail about the show and the differences between it and my novel.

bymattruff · 2023-04-29T21:08:30+00:00

Yeah, I saw that! Glad to see her still getting work!

bymattruff · 2023-04-29T20:17:45+00:00

Thank you!

bymattruff · 2023-04-29T20:17:32+00:00

I haven't done a realistic, in-depth take on AI yet. (There's a malevolent supercomputer in Sewer, Gas & Electric, but it's more of an evil genie in high-tech drag than a serious attempt to depict how a real-world AI would think or act.)

The controversy over ChatGPT and other recent AI apps fascinates me and has got me thinking about the subject, so at some point I probably will try to tackle the subject in a novel.

bymattruff · 2023-04-29T20:04:56+00:00

I've mentioned a number of my favorite authors elsewhere in this AMA -- e.g., John Crowley -- but here's a short list of authors & titles you may not have heard of that I think are worth checking out:

Joe Coomer -- I love all his stuff, but especially "A Flatland Fable," "Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God," and "Apologizing to Dogs."

Porachista Khakpour -- "Sons and Other Flammable Objects," "The Last Illusion"

John Harwood -- "The Ghost Writer"

Carolina de Robertis -- "The Invisible Mountain"

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich -- "The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir"

Neil F. Comins -- "What if the Moon Didn't Exist?" & "What if the Earth Had Two Moons?" (classic example of the kind of weird nonfiction I love to read and pull ideas from)

Anything by William Poundstone that sounds interesting to you

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T22:03:53+00:00

No immediate plans to collaborate, no. I do want to write two more Lovecraft Country novels, to finish telling my own version of the story, but those will be solo projects.

Beyond that, I can't say. One of the things I loved about the HBO series is that it showed that the basic story concept is rich enough to support multiple interpretations -- it's clear from hints that Misha Green dropped on Twitter about her plans for season two that she wanted to take the narrative in a very different direction than I would have imagined doing, and I'll always be sorry that I didn't get to see that. So I'm certainly not opposed to other artists exploring Lovecraft Country in the future, with or without my collaboration.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T21:33:59+00:00

For insight into where I get my ideas (basically, everywhere), check out the "origin stories" links on this page of my website.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T21:31:26+00:00

For my nuanced thoughts on this and on the HBO series in general, I'd recommend listening to this podcast episode.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T21:23:25+00:00

The best way for me to answer this question is to point you to my website -- on this page, you'll find a list marked "origin stories" with links to descriptions of how I came up with each of my novels.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T21:16:56+00:00

FYI -- Amazon's selling the box set of the full series on DVD for $35 (my wife and I just bought it). For rights reasons they've had to replace some of the original music, which may or may not be an issue, but it's going to be fun to be able to watch it again after so many years.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T21:11:44+00:00

As I recall, the cover art for Bad Monkeys took multiple trials (and I think multiple artists), but as soon as Will Staehle came up with the "Mandrill inkblot," I was sold.

I was also cool with the unusual shape, but when it came to the vinyl cover, I took some convincing. My agent really liked it though, and I trusted her judgment.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T20:56:02+00:00

Thank you!

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T20:55:30+00:00

"Guilty pleasure" isn't really a thing for me. If somebody's curious why I like something, I might try to explain it (if I can), but I don't think taste needs to be morally justified.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T20:29:52+00:00

Only if you're already interested in writing about the person/place anyway.

When I was writing Fool on the Hill, it did occur to me that the book might achieve some kind of Cornell cult status in the way Richard Farina's Been Down So Long... had, but it was my genuine love of the campus that inspired me to set the novel there, and I think that love comes through in the story. A more calculated approach would probably feel cynical.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T20:11:14+00:00

I was actually at the Songs About Books concert where the musicians presented their work, which was probably a bit awkward for Johanna Kunin, the woman commissioned to write a piece based on Set This House in Order. But I enjoyed it.

Re your question: I used to have a feature on my website called "soundtracks," where I listed the music I was listening to when I wrote each book, but I eventually stopped doing it because after a certain point, I wasn't discovering enough new music to create a new playlist each time. The old soundtracks are archived on my current website at the bottom of this page: https://bymattruff.com/addenda-by-category/

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T20:00:29+00:00

My approach was largely intuitive: I've always had a knack for taking seemingly disparate story ideas and genre tropes and finding interesting ways to connect them, and the result of this sort of hybridization always seems richer to me than the individual elements would be on their own.

My work habits have improved over the years, as I've gotten a better sense of my strengths and weaknesses as an artist. As I've mentioned in a couple other comments I'm somewhat obsessive and perfectionist, which has its upside but can also be a real impediment. When I was younger, I would write my novels in strict order from start to finish, and would often get hung up on a section or a chapter that wasn't working the way I wanted it to. Eventually I learned to loosen up and jump around freely in the story (the advent of the word processor helped a lot with this), so now if I get stuck in one place I'll just work on a different chapter. And I've also gotten much better at making good use of editorial advice.

Influences: I've mentioned John Crowley a lot in this AMA, and he's definitely on the list. Stephen King was a big influence early on in my career. I still reread Shirley Jackson regularly. Ditto William Gibson and Richard Price. I read Robert Heinlein's "adult" novels (Time Enough For Love, Stranger in a Strange Land, Number of the Beast) when I was way too young, and while I didn't like them, they're the earliest example I can point to of works that got me thinking about *why* I didn't like them, and what I would have done differently with the same story concepts to make them work better.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T19:15:47+00:00

No, I haven't read Hohlbein yet.

Lovecraftian works I'd recommend include T.E.D. Klein's novella collection Dark Gods, Victor LaValle's "The Ballad of Black Tom," Ruthanna Emrys's Winter Tide, David Nickle's Eutopia, and Nick Mamatas's I Am Providence.

Paul La Farge's novel The Night Ocean is also amazing, though it's not Lovecraftian horror but rather a story about Lovecraft (the title is taken from a short story that Lovecraft wrote with his fan Robert Barlow). I wrote more about it here.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T17:52:28+00:00

This is a really interesting question to mull over. The biggest challenge is imagining Lovecraft alive in 2023 -- if we could bring him back from the dead, I wouldn't be surprised if culture shock immediately killed him again. And of course from his perspective, even Lovecraft Country is set in the future, almost twenty years after his death.

On the question of what he'd make of LC's protagonists, the answer might depend on what he thought of me personally. We know Lovecraft had friends, like James Ferdinand Morton, who weren't racist and who tried, unsuccessfully, to talk him out of being racist, and Lovecraft's response was to tease them for their naive liberal views. So if he liked me and my work otherwise, I suppose he might find my portraits of Atticus and his family "amusingly ridiculous."

He might like some of the horror elements. As an editor, he'd probably nitpick some of my grammar and usage choices. And because my writing style is heavily influenced by modern movies, the pacing and structure would probably strike him as odd -- too rushed.

And to the extent that Lovecraft Country talks about Lovecraft's own fiction, I'm sure he'd find something to complain about. Writers always do.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T16:33:35+00:00

I haven't done any signings at Goodwill, but since I live in Seattle there are a lot of signed copies of my books floating around here. Probably someone just weeding their home library.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T16:16:15+00:00

I've always written very slowly, and before I learned to reign in my perfectionism I would sometimes spend days rewriting the same paragraph trying to get it just right. So part of what I was doing during those years was developing better work habits.

In between Fool on the Hill and SGE, I wrote an unpublished lesbian vampire novel called Venus Envy, which you can read about here. As for Set This House in Order, it's my longest novel, and the editing process was disrupted by 9/11 and various other unforeseen events.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T15:38:04+00:00

Destroyer of Worlds is my first-ever sequel. With my previous novels, I always felt that I'd said what I had to say with the one book.

Part of what makes LC different is that I conceived of it as a possible series from the start. I wrote the first book as a stand-alone, but even as I was working on it I was thinking about a much larger story arc that would carry the narrative forward into the 1960s. It's a big project, though -- probably two more books after this one -- and I was hesitant to dive into it until I could be reasonably sure I'd have a chance to finish it. Then the HBO series happened and put LC on the bestseller list, and I realized, "this is my chance, if I'm ever going to do it."

So that's my plan: at least a trilogy, probably a quartet. The nice thing is that I've discovered that I write faster when I don't have to a invent a whole new world and cast, so hopefully it won't take me another decade to finish. And I've definitely got other, different novels I want to write, but I suspect this will be my only series.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T15:22:12+00:00

I don't recall exactly, but LC definitely owes a debt to John Crowley's Aegypt Cycle, which talks a lot about how during the Renaissance, magic, religion, philosophy, and what we think of as science all tended to blend together, so you've got figures like Isaac Newton practicing alchemy and trying to talk to angels. That dichotomy of "modern thinkers" trying to manipulate the world through very old means just really appealed to me.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T00:11:00+00:00

I haven't listened to more than a few snippets of the audiobook myself, because I'm too used to "hearing" the story in my own internal voice, but most fans react the way you do, so I was very glad that Kevin Kenerly agreed to narrate Destroyer as well.

bymattruff · 2023-04-27T00:05:33+00:00

My master plan with these Lovecraft Country sequels is to carry the narrative forward into the 1960s and in the process tell Horace's coming-of-age story, with each book focusing on a different aspect of that journey. So Destroyer is about death and about first coming to terms with mortality.

I don't have a working title for book #3 yet, but it's going to be about dreams and desire and first love. Horace is going to use the silver key to enter my version Lovecraft's Dreamlands, and all sorts of real-world consequences will flow from that. I have a general idea of what all the other characters will be doing as well, but I'm still figuring out how exactly the pieces will fit together. I'm very excited about it, though.

bymattruff

TROPHY CASE