Slimy, green book

There's something to be said for a TV series that opens with Jackie Robinson splattering what is nominally Great Cthulhu with a baseball bat. Even if I wasn't already interested in things Lovecraft, that opening scene of Lovecraft Country would've been enough to stop me from channel surfing and to take a moment to see just where this thing might go. It's based on the novel of the same name, about a young, Black man and his family and their encounters on the road in Jim Crow America and how the horrors of bigotry are often just as awful, if not worse, than facing down an interdimensional demon.

For those that don't know, it's worth mentioning up front that H. P. Lovecraft was an unrepentant racist. Many of his more famous creations are rooted in his opinions of people not like him and, quite often, Black people, such as Nyarlathotep, often known as The Black Man or Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods, and so on. You'd like to think that it's akin to things like the antisemitism of Wagner, except that HPL's racism is actually embodied in his work. It wasn't a universal theme in his output, but it was there. So it was singularly appropriate for author, Matt Ruff, to take those not-so-subtle themes and turn the spotlight on them and still get to engage shoggoths and demon hounds while he was at it. I haven't read the book, but from what I've heard from people who have, the first episode of the HBO series, released last night, stayed in lockstep with Ruff's vision.

In some respects, the overall premise isn't that different from Green Book, except that the Black people in this show actually have agency. They do get some help from a woman in a silver car (Does she start it with a silver key...?) but otherwise they're encountering and mostly solving their own problems. That agency is driven by familial and emotional concerns, which also means that they're real people; not itinerant adventurers who want to motor halfway across the country to look into weird things in backwoods Massachusetts. 

Jonathan Majors does some compelling work as Atticus "Tic" Freeman. I remember him from Last Black Man in San Francisco, but little else. I also like Jurnee Smollett's turn as Letitia Lewis, especially when it becomes apparent that she's not particularly attached to anyone or anything, but mostly just takes advantage of people for the couple days that she needs before she moves on. That's not exactly a sympathetic character but, again, it's a real character, as I'm sure that most of us know someone(s) like that. She's not malicious about it. An unwillingness to be tied down or forced into societal roles is often seen as a trait to be admired and it's a continuation of theme, given the number of forced roles that Black people in this country often still have to adopt. But there's emotional impact from that kind of behavior and it's something to build a real story upon.

It says something, too, that it's basically a relief when the monsters show up to rescue Tic, Tish, and George from the police. (This is where I always remember the line from Fletch: "Oh. Thank God. The... police.") The show builds tension nicely from the restaurant to the World's Slowest Car Chase scene and continues it into the woods and the running chase/battle from there. Again, tribute to the writers and producers for picking up Ruff's themes so well. "They only come out at night" is a phrase that could've been applied to sundown towns, where the real monsters were the cops and the local klansmen (Sometimes a two-fer! Those who burn crosses are the same who work forces, yo.) The gore might be a little OTT for a mythos rooted mostly in eerieness and dread, but doing a more active take on HPL's ominous darkness isn't a bad thing. That's what you'll get if you play Arkham Horror and end up walking around with a double-barreled sawed-off and nightgaunts all over the streets.

That's not the only deviation from the mythos, though. Rather than using one of the classic HPL towns (Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich, etc.), the writers decided to suggest it was a misread of a letter from Tic's father and the town they're looking for is actually "Ardham." This is kind of clever, in that the characters are already aware of HPL's fiction (and racism) and it would end up being kind of trite if Arkham really existed. This way, it can basically exist, but it's actually some other village in the hinterlands of New England. This draws the audience in with the characters as we're all living out our fantasies of being investigators of the power of the Old Ones. On that topic, we delve into a true nerd moment here in the fight scene, as it's implied that the beasts in the forest are shoggoths, which Atticus refers to as "blobs with eyes and teeth." He's right but, with maybe one exception, that's not what those things were. They reminded me much more of the hounds of Tindalos, except they didn't come out of the angles in the walls. (Go on. Wiki it up. I'll wait.) Shoggoths are also usually translucent, which these things weren't. But that's sticking to canon which many, many other authors after HPL didn't and, if they're taking liberties, more (ancient) power to them.

There were some smart little details elsewhere in the episode, as well, like the Denmark Vesey bar. Vesey was a former slave who was executed for supposedly planning a slave revolt in Charleston, SC. Also, we see Tic reading A Princess of Mars, the first in the Barsoom/John Carter series, which is a story about an Earth man going to a new world where he is the outsider among several races of Martians separated by the color of their skins. He is occasionally mistaken for being one of the white apes of Barsoom; the only truly savage species of humanoid on the planet...

So, I think this has promise and I'm interested to see where it goes. Next week's episode is entitled "Whitey's on the Moon". I'll be back then.