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OPINION: 'Get Out' meets 'The Blob' in quirky 'Lovecraft'

Things are about to get unreal for Courtney B. Vance, Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett in HBO’s “Lovecraft Country.”
(HBO/Eli Joshua Ade)
Things are about to get unreal for Courtney B. Vance, Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett in HBO’s “Lovecraft Country.” (HBO/Eli Joshua Ade)

That "Lovecraft Country," which premieres Sunday on HBO, has something to say about the ordinary horrors of racism as well as the cosmic ones of fantastic fiction is mixed into its foundation.

Matt Ruff, on whose 2016 novel the series is based, was inspired in part by Pam Noles' 2006 essay "Shame," about the unbearable whiteness of sci-fi and the difficulties it presents to what she calls an "FoP," as in, "Fan of Pigment," and in its particulars by "The Negro Motorist Green-Book" and by James W. Loewen's study "Sundown Towns," as in "get out by." (Ruff is white; series developer Misha Green, who previously wrote for the sci-fi series "Heroes" and "Helix" and created "Underground," as in Railroad, is Black.)

There is a natural temptation to compare "Lovecraft Country" to "Watchmen" -- which also put Black heroes and Black history at the center of a genre piece -- and, because Jordan Peele is an executive producer (along with J.J. Abrams and others), to Peele's watershed satirical horror movie "Get Out" -- which, like "Lovecraft," is a tale of white people using Black people for their own ends. But, while not without interest, "Lovecraft" is something less than either.

The racism of H.P. Lovecraft, an influential writer of pulp fiction and weird tales, is well-known; indeed, it's a point the characters explicitly discuss. Still, Ruff's book and Green's series function as much as critique as celebration; the mere fact that the series' heroes are all Black is in itself a riposte to the early 20th-century author, spitting in his otherwise admired eye.

Atticus has received a letter from his father, Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams), indicating the discovery of "a secret legacy, a birthright that's been kept from you" in a place Atticus first misreads as Arkham, the fictional Massachusetts town in which Lovecraft set many of his stories. It turns out the town is actually called Ardham, because Arkham is "fictional," or more fictional, in the context of the series, but it's a moot point: Here Be Monsters, including what looks to be a shoggoth, Lovecraft's own many-eyed blob.

He makes the trek into darkest New England in the company of his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), a fellow sci-fi fan and publisher of the "Green Book"-inspired "Safe Negro Travel Guide," and childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), whom the series promotes to a love interest for Atticus, not wanting the attractiveness of its leads to go to waste.

When, having braved racist townspeople, a racist gas station attendant, racist cops and the aforementioned blob, they finally come to the Gothic pile where they expect to find Montrose, they are greeted by a troika of characters (Tony Goldwyn, Abbey Lee, Jordan Patrick Smith) so pop culturally Aryan that one expects them to break any minute into a chorus of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me."

This is only an opening chapter. Ruff's book is constructed as a set of linked short stories, and the series too has a semi-anthological structure that plays with different sorts of stories and moods -- a haunted house, an underground quest, ancient texts, magical space travel -- in and among the merely human intrigue, squabbling, family business and love stuff. Only the first five episodes, of 10, are out for review; so far, there is a substantial enough resemblance to the novel to suggest that the series will follow its arc, even as there are differences enough to suggest that it might not.

There are departures from the page; fans of the novel, and I know they will be in the minority of viewers, will note some gender-swapping, some new sexual identities. There is not much in the way of sex, or sexual identity, in the book, but this is premium cable television and so ... there is. And Green has made sure to interpolate or amplify other sorts of action -- car chases, gun battles, flooding underground passageways, decapitation -- to keep things lively. Smollett is especially good at taking a heroic stance. She is the character you most don't want to mess with, though it's Wunmi Mosaku, as her economically frustrated sister Ruby, who makes the greater impression, in a transmogrification storyline. Ruby sings the blues, too, and rhythm & blues, and Mosaku should be first in line for the Sister Rosetta Tharpe bio-pic you can put on your schedule now, studio heads.

But the series can also feel overheated, over-motivated, muddled and unsubtle, and not just because every single white character is trouble, if not implausibly so, on a scale from casually clueless to actively evil. Its emotional volume has a way of drowning out its humor.

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‘LOVECRAFT COUNTRY’

Where: HBO

When: Debuts Sunday at 8 p.m.

Rated: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

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