Midway along his intended route was the city of Louisville, Kentucky, which according to the Guide had a restaurant that would serve him lunch. He had another six hundred miles to go to Chicago. In the diner the next morning he consulted a road atlas. The price of the room, as promised by the Guide, was three dollars. Atticus chose the motel, which had an attached 24-hour diner. The Safe Negro Travel Guide had listings for four hotels and a motel, all in the same part of the city. At one of the gas stops the colored restroom was out of order, and when the attendant refused him the key to the whites’ room, Atticus was forced to urinate in the bushes behind the station.

The first day he drove 450 miles, eating and drinking from a basket he’d packed in advance, stopping the car only to get gas. He’d left Jacksonville two days before in a secondhand ’48 Cadillac Coupe that he’d bought with the last of his Army pay. Frankly, I’d have to side with Ida-the Black housemaid condemned to another dimension-that a person with no regard for your life is far more fearsome than a monster willing to eat you alive…Ītticus was almost home when the state trooper pulled him over. My mother was only a few years younger than Horace in 1954, and the stories she’s told me about driving from the North to the South to visit her sharecropper relatives would leave you chilled. There really were travel guides for colored people to help them pass safely through Jim Crow strongholds. travelling across the country aren’t fantasy. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his-and the whole Turner clan’s-destruction.” (via Goodreads) Braithwhite-heir to the estate that owned Atticus’s great grandmother-they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.Īt the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn-led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb-which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. When his father Montrose goes missing, twenty-two year old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George-publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide-and his childhood friend Letitia.

Matt ruff lovecraft