I wasn’t sure Lovecraft Country needed a sequel but when I saw THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS: A Return to Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff at the library, I couldn’t resist checking it out. The book catches us up on the Turner family in 1957: Atticus’ father Montrose drags him off to research some family history, Henrietta does errands for a ghost (and winds up on a nuclear test site at one point, justifying the title’s reference to a famous Robert Oppenheimer quote about the bomb) and Ruby continues building a new life thanks to the potion that enables her to pass. 
Much like the first book, this feels like several TV episodes cobbled together, but less successfully. In Lovecraft Country, everything tied in with the struggle against Caleb Braithwaite and the Ancient Dawn occult group; here the plotlines are too loosely related to work well. For example, Atticus and Montrose encounter a slave ancestor in one plot thread; it’s a tense tale but the only pay off is to provide a deus ex machina for the book. The handling of blacks passing as white isn’t as badly done as the first book but it still feels off. 
And it’s really odd that nobody, not even Montrose — the Turner most passionate about racial justice — acknowledges the civil rights movement is ongoing; from the lack of discussion, you’d think nothing had changed since 1954 when the first book began. There’s a sequel in the works; we’ll see if I read it.
Considering I couldn’t even finish T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones, I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed WHAT MOVES THE DEAD — which while a remake of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher also feels kin to Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space. The protagonist is Easton, a female soldier visiting her friends Madeline and Roderick Usher in their decaying manse. Why does the nearby tarn fill her with such dread? Why do the local rabbits seem to be spying on her? How can some of the wildlife get up after its been shot? And what strange disease is destroying the Ushers? It works as both horror and character study. While the worldbuilding isn’t central the details of Easton’s quirky central-European culture are quite fascinating.
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