Lovecraft Country 1.3: Anthology

It should be apparent by now that Lovecraft Country is an anthology of separate stories set on a foundation of a continuing underlying story, rather than just a straightforward continuing story.  This has the effect of making the underlying story more difficult to follow, but allowing the series to explore a lot more than one classic horror trope.

Last night, episode 1.3 brought us a deeply haunted house.  Leti buys it, a real fix-me up, on the white side of Chicago.  She not only encounters all manner of ghostly inhabitants in the basement, but white racist hoodlums who put up a burning KKK cross on her lawn and do their best to frighten her into leaving the house.  She of course isn't frightened by them - she has the ghosts to worry about - and before the episode is over, the racists get their due comeuppance.

Meanwhile, the underlying story has at least once excellent development:  Leti and Atticus have at it.  This is handled with grace and sensitivity and vulnerability.   Amidst all the horror around them, it's good to see human relationships triumphing.

Unfortunately, it looks like Uncle George is indeed dead.  But when you're dealing with magic and horror, it's always important to keep in mind that dead isn't the same as in our non-magical world, in which the horror can and does have irrevocable effects.   So can we look forward to George returning, and, if so, in a fully corporeal human not ghostly fashion?

Just one of the things I'll be watching for in the weeks ahead.

See also Lovecraft Country 1.1: Racist Police Get Horror Comeuppance ... Lovecraft Country 1.2: Malleable Dreams

 

Lovecraft Country 1.2: Malleable Dreams

I decided to watch Lovecraft Country 1.2 tonight - though it was on last night - instead of the first night of the Republican National Convention because, come on, you know which one was the greater horror.

But Lovecraft Country nonetheless had horror a plenty, which I'll talk about in a minute or two, after I go over two of my favorite ingredients.

The music in this series is brilliantly chosen.  I have to give a shout-out to "The End," because the one and only Jimmy Krondes wrote the music all those decades ago.  And, I actually wrote some songs with Jimmy, too, a few years after he wrote "The End".  Here's a YouTube video of one of them - Snow Flurries (#s 38, 59, 86 on this list were also written by Jimmy Krondes and me.)

The other stand-out ingredient is the acting.  I mentioned Jonathan Majors as Atticus, and Jurnee Smollett and Courtney B. Vance in other lead roles in my review of the first episode last week.  The second episode gives us a good  couple of scenes with Michael Kenneth Williams as Montrose, who is Atticus's father.  I've never seen an actor (includes actress) from The Wire in another role who wasn't excellent - I often think that series was the best ever on television - and it was great to see Williams aka Omar Little doing what he does again in Lovecraft Country.  My only regret is that I hope Vance's character (Atticus's Uncle) didn't die.

I don't know the story (haven't read the novel), so I don't know that he did.  But (and here we get to the plot) there's apparently a pretty good chance that anyone who is killed in Lovecraft Country can be brought back to life, if they were even dead in the first place, as long Atticus does what the powers that be want of him.  It worked with Leti (Jurnee Smollett) in this episode.  I'm still not clear exactly what's going on, but apparently a lot of what happens to people are dreams, illusion, or being under spells, which are more amenable to alteration and improvement than real life.

See you back here, I hope, next week.

See also Lovecraft Country 1.1: Racist Police Get Horror Comeuppance

 

 

Lovecraft Country 1.1: Racist Police Get Horror Comeuppance

Finally had a chance to watch the debut of Lovecraft Country on HBO.   I was pulled away this past week by the Democratic National Convention, televised and virtual and truly inspiring.  And it was oddly appropriate that I did not look at Lovecraft Country until just a few nights before the upcoming Republican convention, which begins on Monday.  Creepily appropriate, because Lovecraft Country is a tableau of racism and horror, and that's pretty much what I expect to find in the Republican National Convention.  Would be nice if that meant I didn't need to watch any of those four blustering nights.

I know, it may not be good style to mix real politics and popular culture, but times have changed.  H. P. Lovecraft was a real author of horror, and a real racist.  Since I'm no fan of horror, I've never read much of Stephen King, whose progressivism is in an accord with mine.  So I certainly didn't bother with Lovecraft, and always found mentions of his Cthulhu at science fiction conventions mildly annoying.  

To make matters worse -- worse for my being anything like a knowledgeable reviewer of Lovecraft Country -- I haven't read Matt Ruff's 2016 novel by the same name, which explores the mix of horror and racism in a narrative whose hero Atticus Turner is an African-American devotee of pulp science fiction that flourished along with racism in the first half or so of the 20th century.  But I've always held that reviews of television and cinema by people who haven't read the novels are a necessary part of the critical process, because they can evaluate the movie or TV show on its own terms, rather than in comparison to the novel or short story.

So what did I think of the first episode of Lovecraft Country?  I liked it a lot.  It was fun seeing the racist murderous police get their comeuppance by another H. P. Lovecraft monster, the Shoggoth.   That was a fine metaphoric fulfillment of Atticus's appreciation of bug-eyed monster science fiction.   The genre is intrinsically a celebration of the unlikely hero, and it's a cool twist to make the genre itself a component of the heroism in this story.

I was asked a few weeks ago by Elizabeth Yuko, writing an article for Reader's Digest,  to offer an example of a science fiction novel that accurately predicted the future.  I offered Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (to see why, here's the Reader's Digest article).  If Reader's Digest ever asks me to choose a horror novel that got the future right, I might well choose Ruff's Lovecraft Country, as a strong metaphoric example of racist police getting just what they deserve.

But I'll try to watch the rest of the HBO series first, which by the way has good acting by Jonathan Majors as Atticus, and Jurnee Smollett and Courtney B. Vance in other lead roles.

See also Lovecraft Country 1.2: Malleable Dreams