Sunday Morning! “Lovecraft Country”

This week, I ravenously absorbed the final chapters of Matt Ruff’s novel “Lovecraft Country” like I was a protoplasmic cosmic slime with floating eyes and narrow wings, too horrible to behold. I’ve been taking my time with it because I genuinely enjoyed the series and novel. This was a bit surprising, frankly, because I’m not a huge fan of Lovecraft’s dripping, clammy, adjective-heavy prose, although I do recognize the pleasures of his weird ideas. I’m also not a series watcher normally because I simply lack the attention span for them. By episode three, I’ve usually forgotten some character’s name or why they’re talking to another character, or what the point of all this was supposed to be.

And, let’s be honest, it’s not as if Misha Green’s HBO series was exactly easy to follow; the show packs in so many subplots, historical connections, cultural allusions, weird monstrosities, and au curant social issues that it felt, at times, like an overloaded Christmas tree. And yet, I still had a blast watching it, following along in Twitter threads about the most recent episodes, and even listening to podcasts, lord help me!

The novel is a bit like that tree before Christmas: a stripped down, bare bones framework that the program follows- more or less. One of the complaints made about the show was the characters were never fully fleshed out, but they are worlds apart from the stock figures in the novel, many of whom basically show up and have adventures. Of course, to be fair, that is what pulp fictional characters do, and Ruff’s novel is self-consciously, lovingly pulp.

The overall story is basically the same: two interconnected Black families in Chicago get entangled in the occult and the uncanny in 1954. Atticus Turner has just returned from fighting in Korea to the city where his father and uncle publish the Safe Negro Travel Guide, a sort of play on the Green Book popularized by the maudlin Academy Award winner. These books were intended to allow Black travelers to safely cross the same country that was wide open to their white counterparts, and one of the insights of the novel is how, outside of any fantasy tropes, race and class differences really did put people into overlapping parallel dimensions, often within the same town or county. Many people simply stayed put.

Naturally, our heroes aren’t so lucky. Atticus’s strict- to the point of being abusive- father, Montrose, has gone missing, and he, his uncle George, and family friend Letitia go looking for him in the creepy part of New England they call “Lovecraft Country.” Here, they find segregation, racists a plenty, a powerful secret society of warlocks and magicians, and strange monsters lurking in the woods. Their friends and kin have to muster their resources to take on the powerful and nefarious Braithwhite family, whose surviving child has evil intentions of his own. The twist? Atticus is related by blood to the Briathwhite ancestor who apparently raped one of his slaves, and blood is all-powerful here.

The real H.P. Lovecraft was, of course, terrified by miscegenation; it figures into some of his weirder stories. The novel and series both pull out the complicated feelings Lovecraft’s deep streak of racist lunacy now inspires in his fans. Atticus and his uncle George are devotees of pulp science fiction and one of the pleasures of “Lovecraft Country” is how it finds the overlapping territory between students of African American history and sci-fi/fantasy/horror fans. In recent years, it’s been wonderful to see Black genre geeks finally get their due and, judging by my Twitter feed, it was widely appreciated.

Nearly every review of the show has said that it blends genre monsters and racist ones, with the racist monstrosities being more terrifying. This blending of fantasy and real-life horrors is a bit more pronounced in the novel, where it’s less diluted by other themes. But the series, frankly, deepens the story at every turn. Atticus and Letitia maybe flirt once in the book; in the series, they fall in love, conceive a child, and their relationship becomes the backbone of the main storyline. In the novel, Atticus has some aw shucks adventures and walks off into the sunset; the series gives him a very different ending. Green and executive producer Jordan Peele seemed to be aiming to spin something like mythology out of pulp.

One of the most notable changes from page to screen, however, is Ruff’s novel focuses mainly on the social context of anti-black racism in the 1950s, while Green’s show deals more openly with other contexts of oppression, such as patriarchy, abuse, and homophobia. This could be done in a heavy-handed way, but here it creates a general atmosphere in which everyone is hiding in their own skin, even if they’re not body-swapping creatures. The use of magic becomes, in both novel and show, a way the characters get themselves free. As I noted last week, the great American stories are almost always about the individual’s quest to achieve freedom.

Interestingly, “Lovecraft Country” was initially planned as a series. Ruff was hoping to do something like the X-Files with a cast of characters solving mysteries and fighting the supernatural in 1950s America. He decided to rework this into a novel, while keeping a sort of episodic structure in which each character has their own eerie adventure. It works well and the story never lags. It’s an easy read, but there’s also a subversive kick to the ways the story plays off racist tropes and genre ones. So, a story about a hex and a possessed “pygmy devil doll” becomes a comment on vintage racist advertising. In the series, the devil doll becomes two truly terrifying “pickaninny” demons based directly on characters from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; the child hexed is switched from being a boy to a girl; and the episode begins with a funeral for her friend, Emmitt Till.

And the show really was dense, packed with meaning and allusions. At times, this felt a bit scattered; a story in the novel in which the character Hippolyta (a reference to the Amazon warrior, but here a housewife) travels to an alien planet through a portal and back in the novel was, in the series, an afro-futuristic quest for self-actualization complete with time travel, dancing in 1930s Paris with Josephine Baker, fighting French colonials with the Dahomey Amazons (scored to “Fire” by the great Atlanta funk band Mother’s Finest!), a genuinely moving reconciliation with her dead husband, and reckoning with all the ways she made herself smaller to fit a racist patriarchal society, ending with comic book outer space adventures. Was it a bit much? Sure. It was also invigorating and brought tears to my eyes in a few places, something that never happens with art.

Another complaint that has been made about the show is all of the white characters are uniformly terrible. The American 50s is remembered as an era of white supremacy and repression, but something more horrible to consider is that most people are not really terrible; they just aren’t particularly good when they need to be. Of course, most white people aren’t evil spell-casting witches, warlocks, and alchemists either! The comic book pulp elements were never far from the surface, something that can be dicey in a story that is also dealing with “sundown towns”, Emmett Till, and the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Overall, though, the density of the show, and the novel, seemed like an attempt to do as much as possible because the creators might not get another chance. It’s a rich framework; entire storylines were added for the program, but others were also excised entirely. They could easily make an entire mythos out of these characters and situations. And, ya know, given how successful the series has turned out to be, that will likely happen! And I will be watching; I eat this kind of stuff up. Just don’t expect me to follow any other series without losing the thread!

So, what are YOU watching, pondering, playing, fighting, or conjuring this weekend?

Note: It would be remiss not to mention the recent passing of the great actress Carol Sutton, who recently appeared in the series Lovecraft Country and died on Thursday of complications from COVID-19. Rest in Peace.