In the book “Blood Talk,” from 2003, the scholar Susan Gillman describes a category of fin-de-siècle literature that she calls the “race melodrama,” a genre defined by its occultish grapplings with the Negro question. It includes, on the one hand, such marvels as “Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self,” a serial novel by Pauline Hopkins, the editor of Colored American Magazine (until she was supplanted as part of a hostile acquisition orchestrated by Booker T. Washington), in which a passing medical student with a talent for mesmerism travels to Ethiopia for an archeological expedition and ends up claiming his birthright at the helm of an ancient civilization responsible for all men, Black and white. On the other hand, the genre includes “The Clansman” (better known for its cinematic adaptation, “The Birth of a Nation”), the novel in which Thomas Dixon, Jr., stokes white-supremacist fears with mystic science, as in a scene involving the hypnotism of a Black man to extract a criminal confession. This strain of storytelling, Gillman argues, was uniquely poised to flutter the veil between Black and white, conscious and subconscious, known and unknown. What better mode than melodrama, maligned then and now for its flights and fits of fancy and passion—secret kinships, twins and twinned fates, inklings, hallucinations, miscegenation, dead ends, and ancient dictums—to contain the excesses of racial meaning?
H. P. Lovecraft, the acknowledged forebearer of modern-day supernatural fiction, is still best renowned as a stylist, the warden of eldritch horrors that expressed an especial dread of the twentieth century—Edgar Allan Poe exploded to the scale of the cosmos. But his racism has grown notorious in an era when we have a mind to care about such things. In his story “The Horror at Red Hook,” to take one common example, the occult rituals of a reclusive scholar are the result of his perilous embrace of mongrel urbanity. And a psychological reading of his oeuvre presents the compelling case that he sublimated his xenophobia and anti-Blackness into his tales of ancient aliens. Lovecraft’s storytelling, with its cosmic impressions on the psyche, was not untouched by a stroke of melodrama, either. But behind his work, in which the unknown is too horrible to bear, was a faith in the value of dwelling in mystery—a faith that is more scarcely held in our present, when we prefer to see ourselves as one reading list away from mastery.
“Lovecraft Country,” both the novel by Matt Ruff, from 2016, and the television adaptation of the same name, which premiered on HBO last Sunday, are of the present, and thus much surer about what they think is known about the psychic warfare that Sutton E. Griggs, a Black contemporary of Lovecraft’s, called “racial hypnotism.” “Lovecraft Country” also presents an account of segregated America tinged with strangeness: there are supernatural elements aplenty, but the mythos is subdued—terror comes from the human agents of racism and the dread of those who have something to fear. The author Victor LaValle accomplished a similar maneuver in his novella “The Ballad of Black Tom” (2016), which retells “The Horror at Red Hook” from the point of view of Tommy Tester, a Harlem man drawn into the shadowy practices of Robert Suydam, the scholar of the original story. But whereas LaValle works quietly, writing a pastiche that needles the Lovecraft story for its prejudices just by shifting its perspective, “Lovecraft Country” blasphemes racism by putting racism on show in the plainest terms.
The requisite eggs have been laid: a cephalopodic creature that can only be Lovecraft’s Cthulhu appears in a main character’s subconscious; “The Outsider and Others” is pulled off of a shelf. But such references do not mean that the series is interested in torquing the qualities of what’s called Lovecraftian, nor inheriting them. Misha Green, the showrunner, who has said that she bonded with the executive producer, Jordan Peele, over a love of horror, acknowledges the historical influence of the show’s namesake, but told the Times that she isn’t “a huge fan.” The series follows Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Jonathan Majors), a young Korean War veteran and avid reader of weird fiction, in what starts as a quest to find his disappeared father, who he at first believes went to Arkham, Massachusetts, the fictional town of Lovecraft’s creation. Tic is accompanied on this trip by his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) and his childhood friend Leticia (Jurnee Smollett), who become implicated in a family drama that soon converges with supernatural, occultist activity.
The first episode, “Sundown,” begins in a transhistorical, trans-planetary reverie: scenes of trench warfare in black-and-white morph into a technicolor battle for the planet, a sci-fi paradiso starring Jackie Robinson and a princess from Mars. We are brought out of the dream and back to reality with a bump. Tic is on a bus, riding from his post-service landing place of Jacksonville back to his home town of Chicago, “just going over another bridge named after some dead slave owner,” as a fellow-traveller, an older woman in horn-rimmed glasses, near-yells from across the aisle, over the din of the moving vehicle. “Good riddance to Old Jim Crow,” Tic responds, offering the retreating Kentucky state line the bird. Both the bridge line and the gesture have been pulled from Ruff’s novel, as narrated during the final leg of a solo trip Tic takes in a used ’48 Cadillac Coupe. The new setting allows for some even noisier social-studies material: after Tic and his companion exchange a look, the camera pulls back, bringing white passengers sitting in front of them into view and, more importantly, a sign: “THIS PART OF THE BUS FOR THE COLORED RACE.”
Signs, often literal in nature, are crucial to the world-building of “Lovecraft Country.” In the five episodes available for advanced screening, these include maps and road posts that demarcate segregated territory with lethal purpose, on buildings such as the Southside Colored Library, reminders of the thin line between de facto and de jure. In the show’s dialogue, too, America’s divisions are unambiguous. “Holy Ghost,” a haunted-house episode—also a haunted-housing episode—logs, with title cards, the initial days of a real-estate experiment. Leticia, Tic’s friend, has purchased a run-down three-story boarding property as a “safe haven for colored folks” in a white, Northside Chicago neighborhood. “Safe?” her sister Ruby responds, “Just last year there was almost a riot across town because a Negro couple moved into an all-white building.” This is the sort of plainspoken aside that may be welcome from the narrator in a novel, who is privy to but apart from the action. In the mouths of characters en scène, it is clumsily expository. The show’s script is weighed down by historical annotations; characters refer to themselves and others using the nomenclature of the time (Negro, white) instead of the unqualified pronouns—“we,” “us,” “them”—of actual talk. Innuendo, a staple of melodrama, and a mode in which racialized language thrives, is missing.
Neither this nor the show’s cartoonish whites—as viral videos have shown, racists turn cartoonish in the light—would be so distracting if they didn’t deprive mesmerizing talents of their room to work. Majors, who brought such quiet unease to his role in “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” is consistently nonplussed, with less of a grasp than other characters on the mystical dimensions they’re uncovering. Jurnee Smollett, if given more space for the zaniness of which she shows herself capable, could have made Leticia the show’s comedic pillar, lending an element of wry incredulity to the dogged expeditions of the men around her. But “Lovecraft Country” is not pulp (like “iZombie”) or soap (like “Buffy”) or tragicomedy (“Atlanta”). With fewer voiceovers from the annals of Black History Month perhaps it could have been camp, not of the knowing Ryan Murphy variety but something genuinely Sontagian—a “failed,” instead of slick, “seriousness,” etc. More Scooby Doo ghost chases, more impromptu intercourse, more sillies, more willies, more Smollett grinning as if her cheeks might break. Green’s previous series, “Underground,” a delectable period drama loosely structured around exploits along the Underground Railroad, dodged the impossible burdens of representing slavery faithfully by drawing on telenovela techniques. (It was cancelled by WGN after two well-received seasons.) In “Lovecraft Country,” there are revelations but seldom awe.
The creepiest moment in “Lovecraft Country” thus far takes place in its opening episode. The trio—George, Leticia, Tic—is lost in another one of America’s New England nowheres, tired, fed up, and traumatized by a recent run-in with lynch-hungry locals. They pull over in the woods and Tic exits Woody, the family Packard, for a look around, Leticia on his heels with a warning plea: “I don’t think we want to be out here after dark.” There’s a rustling in the trees. “A shoggoth,” Tic says, playfully calling up one of Lovecraft’s creatures. In the background, another car enters the frame, creeps along, comes to a stop behind Woody: a cop car. You wish that Leticia and Tic would turn around already—not that having the monster within their sights would do much good. A shotgun-toting Sheriff emerges from the vehicle with questions, all routine of course: “Who are you? Where y’all from?” Then another: “Any of you all know what a sundown town is?” And the spell is broken, smashed in the cogs of the writers’ bibliography. The scene proceeds, answering with gusto a question the audience was not given the space to ask.
