Did you originally plan to have Lovecraft Country as a television series? I thought the episodic structure of the segments certainly lended themselves for that idea.

Matt Ruff Yes, I initially conceived of Lovecraft Country as a potential TV series back in 2007. (My elevator pitch was, “It’s The X-Files, if Mulder and Scully were black travel writers living in the Jim Crow era.”) The people I was talking to passed on the idea, but the story stayed with me, and I decided to try to make it work as a book.

A part of the original TV show concept I wanted to preserve was this “monster of the week” element where each member of my ensemble cast would get to star in their own reimagined weird tale. I didn’t want to write a short story collection, though, I wanted to write a novel. Eventually I hit on the idea of an episodic novel – basically a TV season in literary form, that you would binge-read instead of binge-watching, and whose individual episodes would gradually be revealed to all be pieces of the same arc story.

Obviously in structuring the novel this way, I hoped that the finished book might also serve as a proof of concept for a possible TV series, but I knew that was a longshot and I certainly never expected it to work out as well as it has.

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