HBO’s Lovecraft Country is both horror and history, bringing together real racial trauma and fictional dark magic in an ambitious and unnerving 10 episode story. Atticus “Tic” Turner (Jonathan Majors), a Black veteran of the war in Korea, has come home to segregated Chicago in the mid-1950s because his estranged father wants to reveal a long-hidden piece of family history. But his father has disappeared to Ardham, Massachusetts—Lovecraft country—in the company of a mysterious wealthy white man. The quest to recover both father and family secrets will have bloody, horrifying consequences spanning time, dimensions, and realities. The series asks viewers to consider what’s scarier: eldritch flesh-eating monsters with dozens of eyes or the everyday violence of Jim Crow-era America?
Based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel of the same name, HBO’s Lovecraft Country stays fairly close to the source material, but the cast gives it a life and a power that weren’t as evident in the print version. Majors is terrific at the action-hero stuff (he has since been cast as Kang the Conquerer in an upcoming Marvel movie), but the series also lets him work through family dynamics, romantic love, and rage over the way the country he served treats Black people. His companions in finding his father include Letitia (“Leti”) Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), a fierce fireball who’s not afraid to use a baseball bat or a spell book when she has to; Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), the creator of a travel guide for Black Americans; Aunt Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis), whose interests lie in discovering the secrets of the universe; their daughter, Diana (Jada Harris), a gifted young artist; and Leti’s half-sister Ruby (Wunmi Musaku), practical job-hunter by day and blues singer by night. Tic’s lost father, Montrose, is the excellent Michael K. Williams, who gets a powerful arc about what it means to find himself as a Black man in America. They’re great together (and outstandingly costumed!) and better than the sometimes uneven episodes.
The pacing within episodes can be awkward—too much comic-book explaining here, too much rushed plot there—but each major character gets to have a meaningful and terrifying adventure within the larger framework of that old white Lovecraftian magic. Accenting the action is an amazing soundtrack that ranges from a Rosetta Tharpe cover to Cardi B and also includes spoken word pieces from James Baldwin, Gil-Scott Heron, and others. The out-of-time juxtapositions emphasize the continuing relevance of history, and it’s a choice that works. The CGI sets are less effective, but the special effects department knocks it out of the park on a smaller scale: that is some very, VERY disturbing body horror going on. (Needless to say, this is an HBO production and also contains a fair amount of explicit sex and nudity, which are sometimes directly linked to the gore. This series is not for kids.) Best of the bunch: Episode 3: “Holy Ghost,” Episode 7: “I Am,” and Episode 8: “Jig-a-Bobo.” Even the lesser episodes, which can be full of plot holes, are still ambitious and interesting.
You don’t need to read the book to enjoy the adaptation, but it helps to have a little bit of familiarity with H.P. Lovecraft’s writing and with historical events like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the brutal murder of Emmett Till in 1955. The horrors don’t only come from out of time and space, they’re also coming from the hate next door. Recommended, and available from the Lebanon County Library System.
A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews 