What would HP Lovecraft (1890-1937) have made of Lovecraft Country (Sky Atlantic)? While the epic new sci-fi-fantasy-horror-drama bears his name and invokes his trademark eldritch monstrosities, I suspect that Lovecraft himself wouldn’t have made it past the opening titles. Not because Lovecraft Country isn’t good television – it’s great television – but because, as well as being a hugely influential pulp fiction author, Lovecraft was a notorious racist. Lovecraft Country, meanwhile, is a beautiful bounty of black creativity and black history. It is protest art, just when the world needs it most.
In the US in the mid-50s, Korean war veteran Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Jonathan Majors of Da 5 Bloods and The Last Black Man in San Francisco) is travelling north from Florida to his family’s home on the South Side of Chicago. Asleep on the bus, he has garish dreams of shooting at flying saucers and slime-dripping aliens, but waking life in the Jim Crow era is hardly less nightmarish, whichever side of the Mason-Dixon Line you find yourself on.
Tic is on the trail of his missing father, Montrose (Michael K Williams), who was last heard from in the area of Massachusetts known as Lovecraft Country because of its association with the author. So, after regrouping in his old neighbourhood, that’s the direction Tic sets off in, accompanied by his Uncle George (Courtney B Vance), a fellow pulp fiction fan and author of Green Book-style safety guides for black travellers; and Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), a childhood friend with a rebellious streak.
It’s when the trio set out on the road – through the rural midwest heartlands, en route to the nation’s historical colonial settlements – that this show’s phenomenal world-building really comes into its own. The visual effects and monster scares are as high spec as you would expect from a show which boasts The Force Awakens’ JJ Abrams as an executive producer. But it’s in the seemingly innocuous period details, and the influence of another executive producer, Get Out’s Jordan Peele, that the true horror lurks. When, for instance, they pull out of a gas station to avoid the racist mockery of a teenager, a billboard using “mammy” imagery to advertise Aunt Jemima’s Pancakes is revealed; it’s insidious and inescapable.
Then there’s Lydia’s, a diner that George is considering for inclusion in his guide, after receiving a tip about it. It’s supposed to be welcoming to black clientele, but something seems off when they walk in – maybe it’s under new management? and it’s not until Tic notices the freshly painted walls that the situation becomes clear. “Uncle George, remind me why the White House is white?” he says. “They had to paint it white to cover up the burn marks,” George tells him, just as Letitia comes screaming out of the bathroom and a mob of locals armed with shotguns comes careening round the corner. This sets up Lovecraft Country’s priorities nicely: expect thrilling action-adventure as the first order of business, but there is historical insight here, too, if you pay attention.
It’s also got heart. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer before it, Lovecraft Country is fantastical horror, grounded in emotionally intelligent family drama. Letitia has a difficult relationship with her older sister Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku), and, for reasons as yet unexplained, didn’t make it home for their mother’s funeral. Tic can’t forgive his alcoholic father for the physical abuse he suffered as a child, even though, as Uncle George points out, Montrose had a difficult childhood, too. Their traumas were first inflicted many years, if not many generations, back but the wound is still red-raw. Or, as Montrose put it in his cryptic letter to his son: “You think that you can forget the past; you can’t. The past is a living thing, you own it, owe it.”
For all of TV’s worthy engagements with Black Lives Matter – the Fox miniseries Shots Fired, episodes of The Good Wife and Scandal – this show, which isn’t even addressing the movement directly, seems to speak to it most meaningfully. It’s no coincidence that Lovecraft Country is also the most entertaining series to grace our screens for months. Showrunner Misha Green knows how to find the joy in the moment – or in the pages of a good pulp novel – without denying the historical context. Perhaps even a blinkered bigot like Lovecraft would have come to admire that eventually.