L*vecraft Country
Matt Ruff & HBO’s revisionist horror tale has little to do with its complicated namesake
by Leslie Lee III | Illustration by Hokowhitu Sciasca
The promotional rollout for the new HBO series Lovecraft Country, adapted from the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff, featured a bizarre PR campaign worthy of the father of cosmic horror. Outlets like the Los Angeles Times and Vox helpfully explained to the public who H.P. Lovecraft is, why he was an irredeemable racist, and how to tune in to the new show with his name in the title.
HBO’s decision to simultaneously introduce, promote, and cancel the creator of the intellectual property they were in the process of selling feels like an escalation in the war between creators and media conglomerates, but it’s one that could easily have been avoided: Aside from the fact that a few of the characters have read the works of Lovecraft, Lovecraft Country’s source material has absolutely nothing to do with H.P. Lovecraft.
Originally conceived as a pitch for an X-Files-style supernatural procedural TV show, Ruff’s Lovecraft Country is a collection of loosely connected, vaguely weird stories set during the early 1950s—spooky PG-13 adventures that would work just as well as episodes of The Outer Limits or Scooby-Doo.
The eldritch horrors of the Lovecraft canon are entirely absent. In their stead are minor protection spells, ghosts, and lots of racism.
Lovecraft Country is a collection of loosely connected, spooky PG-13 adventures that would work just as well as episodes of The Outer Limits or Scooby-Doo.
The novel is set during the era of Jim Crow and Ruff, who is white, dramatizes everything he’s learned about racism—from the Tulsa Massacre to microaggressions—in ways that can be thrilling, tedious, offensive, or silly. If you didn’t know about Sundown Towns, segregation in the military, or redlining, you’ll learn about them in the opening pages of Lovecraft Country. Real-life racism is the dreaded terror that the conflict of the novel centers around. The cops and klansmen that hunt the Turners might occasionally get a helping hand from ghosts and killer dolls, but the ghosts and the killer dolls are also racist.
The overarching story of Lovecraft Country follows the Turner Family as they travel from Chicago and across the country, visiting establishments for entry into The Safe Negro Travel Guide (yes, Lovecraft Country also references The Green Book). Their choice of occupation helps explain why the Turner family criss-crosses the country meeting every racist, living or dead, in Jim Crow’s America, but it also places the characters firmly in the striving black middle class.
For the Turners, racism most often appears as an impediment to their access to more capital and higher-quality consumer goods. Their publication of the motorist guide serves as promotion for the travel agency they own, which specializes in booking trips for Chicago’s black bourgeoisie. Finding ways to profit in spite of racial discrimination seems to be the family’s primary motivation for being.
For the Turners, racism most often appears as an impediment to their access to more capital and higher-quality consumer goods.
Take Atticus Turner. In the first part of the novel, the 22-year-old soldier is informed that he is a descendant of an actual wizard and owed a rank of power in the all-white secret wizard order his ancestor founded. Atticus, however, seems completely uninterested in using or embracing this power, other than to accept a spell that prevents their car from being pulled over while traveling. Later, when family friend Letitia gains an unexpected inheritance, she uses the money to rent out a large property in an all-white neighborhood, thereby becoming its first black landlord. The novel treats this as an act of racial justice.
Lovecraft Country is at its best when the history lessons end and the adventures begin. “Hippolyta Disturbs The Universe,” an imaginative exploration of the cosmos reminiscent of early Ray Bradbury, is by far the strongest of the eight distinct episodes in the novel. The weakest, “Dreams of the Which House,” is a derivative haunted house story where the haunted house uses the N-word, but redeems itself by stopping a hate crime.
HBO’s adaptation of Lovecraft Country attempts to spice up the mundane supernatural elements of the novel with fearsome Lovecraftian monsters and gore. Cthulhu itself appears in the first scene of the show during a dream sequence reminiscent of Ready Player One. (The deity is quickly beaten into paste by Jackie Robinson.) Later in the first episode, “Sundown,” a pack of hundred-eyed beast-things eat racist police officers in a scene reminiscent of the excellent Ash vs Evil Dead series. But even with these welcome additions, TV’s Lovecraft Country is not any more interested in exploring the works and themes of Lovecraft than was Ruff’s original novel.
There have been a number of successful attempts at telling Lovecraftian stories with black characters and perspectives. Laird Barron’s -30-, later adapted into the film They Remain, features a black researcher exploring the former campgrounds of a suicide cult while navigating racial and sexual tension with his coworker, a white ex-lover. Victor LaVelle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom masterfully retells one of Lovecraft’s worst and most racist stories, “The Horror of Red Hook,” from the perspective of a black man who makes his living conning whites who can’t tell he’s a bad jazzman.
Nearly all of Lovecraft’s protagonists feel isolated from society for a variety of reasons, not unlike the alienation blacks and other marginalized people experience.
Both -30- and The Ballad of Black Tom retain the core of the Lovecraft experience: alienation. Nearly all of his protagonists feel isolated from society for a variety of reasons, not unlike the alienation blacks and other marginalized people experience. Alienation is at the heart of the black experience of America. Moreover, Lovecraft was anti-capitalist and the vast cosmic conspiracy at the heart of Lovecraft’s cosmology lends itself to Marxist readings.
When reading Lovecraft Country, one wonders exactly how the Turners feel as somewhat well-off blacks who make their living off of less-well-off blacks and who nevertheless aren’t allowed to make eye-contact with whites on the street. Whatever angst they have is usually reserved for individual racists, and any systemic critique in Lovecraft Country is redirected into a belief that the racism of the Jim Crow South can be escaped through the ritual of building a class of black elite in urban centers. It’s a missed opportunity for the novel, one that the TV show hopefully decides to explore.
The alienation and powerlessness faced by Lovecraft’s protagonists usually leads each to be tempted by the call of the elder things, who can grant them power over a reality that has oppressed and brutalized them.
Giving in to this temptation more often than not leads to eternal doom, but Lovecraft Country crafts a fate even more terrible for the Turners: They come away from their brief dalliance with seemingly limitless power having used it to do little more than pay off their mortgages and start a college fund.
The novel ends with the Turners laughing at all the powers of magic, because even in a pulpy sci-fi fantasy world nothing is powerful enough to overcome racism—aside from a dogged work ethic and fiscal responsibility.
Truly terrifying.
Leslie Lee III is a writer and host of the podcast Struggle Session.
