Lovecraft Country

I say this every time, but the Lovecraft Country book really is so much better.

The Lovecraft Country TV show is fine.  I’d probably never have discovered the book without the show, and my husband really enjoyed the show. But… uh, how do I say this with without sounding like a maiden aunt? I found the show too gratuitous. HBO loves showing boobs and blood, and it’s just too much for me. I hate gore, and I don’t usually like when romance is too explicit. (If I’ve been led to care about the characters before a sex scene, I feel like I’ve accidentally walked in on a friend.)

The book has the same characters I liked in the show, but with more scifi nerdery, more character development, more of a subtle creeping horror and less bloody-body-parts horror. There’s a constant, mundane threat in daily life under segregation, and it’s used to make all the dangers and supernatural horrors frightening and intense. I especially loved Hippolyta’s storyline, which so perfectly blended closed opportunity doors and fantastically opened space portals. Also, at the risk of a mild spoiler (I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to discover that a character can die in an HBO horror show?), there is a person who dies in the show who doesn’t die in the book. I can’t say any more without spoilers, but basically every scene that I wasn’t into didn’t happen in the book, and every relationship that I wanted to explore was developed in the book. I felt like I was reading my own Lovecraft Country fanfiction.

You can see how it’s inspired by Lovecraft stories in many ways: in the horrors of being insignificant humans, in the world of dark ancient knowledge, and in the racist viewpoints of the established society.  I’ve never known what to do about Lovecraft, because he’s tapped into something so primal and disturbing with the idea of the sleeping Old Ones, it’s hard not to be impressed with his work, but the guy was an anti-Semite and a racist, so it’s also hard to be a fan. Atticus has the same questions, as a black scifi reader, only more so, which helped set the tone for the book. Where can you go when even escapism is racist? And what’s a scarier villain, the all-white Sons of Adam secret society or the all-white racist police force?