Lovecraft Country demands pulp fiction back for the Black men and women who excluded it

Lovecraft Country begins with a dream. A Black man fights on a battlefield, but we can not see who he and his colleagues clash with. The reveal is spectacular: aliens, monsters, and a princess of Mars. The Soldier sees a menagerie of impossible beings down from the works of Wells and Burroughs, white writers who only thought of sending white men away on adventures to identify these beings. In this dream, however, the Black soldier is Atticus Freeman, and confronts her with some help from his own hero: Jackie Robinson. Then he wakes up – back to the reality of the fifties, where white men have a right to the world, the paperback on his chest, where white authors lie on fantasy, and the racism that hardly puts him in one of both can exist.

Based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name, Lovecraft Country follows Atticus (Jonathan Majors) as he travels to find his father Montrose (Michael K. Williams) who disappeared somewhere in Massachusetts. On his travels, he is with his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) and child friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), and together they encourage the earthly horrors of racism alongside the other worlds of things unknown.

But those are only the first two episodes. Horror has a way of following you, and Freeman’s family soon becomes a magnet for the strange and terrifying, their neighborhood of Chicago, a place where ghosts and monsters hide in plain sight. Each episode of Lovecraft Country becomes a fable where the moral is the same: racism is a monster, and maybe it’s time for the racists to be a little scared too.

There’s also the case of the man from whom the show takes its name.

Like many American racists, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has an enormous and disproportionate level of influence on his particular field, horror fiction. Similar to DW Griffith, he has a venerated place in the canon because of his groundbreaking work, despite the apparent and apparent repulsiveness of that work. This is not really up for debate; you can see for yourself that Griffith’s is The birth of a nation is Ku Klux Klan propaganda, and much of Lovecraft’s writing is openly racist and shocking even for its time.

Mar helendal, many have said, that is he so good at what he did, and thus inseparable from horror, because he influenced most of your favorite writers. If you’ve dabbled in some kind of horror, there’s a little Lovecraft rattling in your brain, and decades of fiction inspired by it probably puts it there. And so there has been a rot in this mode of fiction – Cosmic horror, stories about what happens to the minds of characters who discover that humanity is unimportant and there are things older and much more powerful than we could comprehend lurking outside our understanding. It’s horror convinced by privilege, the horror that comes from thinking you’re not the most important thing in the universe – the arrogance of Lovecraft’s bigotry codified in genre fiction.

Lovecraft Country is a story about all that to take back, starting with the name of the man who has become synonymous with the kind of horror he produced.

This is what gives Lovecraft Country the most enchanting quality – its tone. The episodic structure makes each episode a different kind of story where Atticus and his family are the heroes, the adventurers tainted by invisible evil, suggested by authors who thought of them as deserving of their own story. For although the show is famous for Lovecraft, racism is not limited to it: it is a hallmark of the genre. The horror of cosmic horror was canonized by men who were not too afraid of their own existence.

Image: HBO

Ensa Lovecraft Country jumps from genre stepping stone to steps, never really put in one place long enough to dive deep into the implications of each starting point, to let the viewer sink into a particular sense of familiarity. It can be reassuring if you are not prepared and dissonant if you expect the kind of “prestige” presentation that suits the HBO market – even often a sense of whiteness and privilege.

Needle drops are often baffling and on the nose, pulling out of Cardi B and Nina Simone. Characterization is random, and dramatic rotation takes place from the left field, just as whole scenes are missing. On some levels, it’s deeply frustrating television, especially when it proves he’s capable of making episodes like ‘Holy Ghost’, a tight and effective horror story about a haunted house full of ghosts who want revenge on the racist who killed her. Mar Lovecraft CountryThe goals are simple, and perhaps they are enough – claiming that horror, even the pulpy kind often perpetrated by the cult, is driven by fear of the Other, and that we have not thought enough about who the other is. it’s scared all this time.

One funny thing about Lovecraft: there are very few direct adaptations of his work, none in mainstream film or television. Give him everything you want; his grip on pop culture consciousness is at best dark. In making Lovecraft Country for HBO, showrunner Misha Green and her collaborators have probably created the most popular work with the man’s name, and applied it to a story that despises him. Like an old God, Lovecraft Country has made its way pink and worked from Ruff’s novel to premium cable and posters and advertisements. It has looked at the name and found that he does not want to, but unintentionally. The fear of which his writing spoke, now turned him to Lovecraft himself.