This revelation is frequently linked to the discovery of a degenerate community of worshippers, people whose humanity has been contaminated with alien blood- fish men being a particular favorite. The typical Lovecraft protagonist pursues some lonely, arcane scholarly quest until he collides with the terrible secret that humanity is an irrelevant speck in a universe presided over by vast, repulsive, powerful entities that our minds cannot even comprehend. An exemplary quote from the story “The Lurking Fear” captures it: “I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time”-the tendrils and the cancer, and the great dark emptiness between the stars. Jemisin has argued persuasively that Lovecraft’s racism is central to the horror he aimed to convey in his work: a cosmic, existential dread combined with profound physical disgust. The racism of Howard Phillips Lovecraft was extreme even for its time, and like Ruff’s novel, the series quotes from a particularly vile poem Lovecraft wrote in 1912, one with the title “On the Creation of N-–s” that only gets more racist from there. Send me updates about Slate special offers.
The series, developed by showrunner Misha Green (who co-created the 2016 historical series Underground), soon resolves itself into a supernatural soap opera, but its primary subject-life as a Black person struggling under the weight of systemic American racism-remains acutely pertinent to Lovecraft’s work. Yet “Lovecraft Country,” a label Ruff never defines but that seems to arch over the whole of the United States, fits the series thematically even as it sets up expectations that may disappoint some fans of the influential horror author. Just how much Lovecraft can be found in Lovecraft Country, the new HBO series based on the 2016 novel of the same title by Matt Ruff? Explicitly, not all that much, despite an opening fantasy sequence in which a monstrous, tentacled being who is very clearly Cthulhu, the most familiar (and-dare I say it?- beloved) of Lovecraft’s “elder gods,” is walloped to icky smithereens by Jackie Robinson, in a scene that surely would have driven Lovecraft himself mad with indignation.
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