H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional universe, known to his slimy, gibbering acolytes as the “Cthulhu Mythos” (after the 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu”), is more easily enjoyed in theory than in practice. Lovecraft’s cosmic schlock was given a patina of respectability by his inclusion in the Library of America in 2005 and by Michel Houellebecq’s slim but provocative study H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Yet it’s hard to deny that Lovecraft was a bad writer, an unspeakably appalling one, in fact, given to such hysterical overwriting that one wonders if the Necronomicon was just a thesaurus bound in human skin. Few authors are more easily parodied. (Google, for instance, the mock Chick tract “Who Will Be Eaten First?”) His cosmology of gods and monsters is Hesiod by way of George Lucas. Like certain substances, he is fun in small doses, fatal in large ones.
Lovecraft was also, as is widely known, an inveterate racist and xenophobe, whose stories express his fear and loathing of “mongrels” and “Levantines.” The clever conceit of Lovecraft Country, first a novel by Matt Ruff and now an HBO television series, grafts Lovecraft’s mythos onto the genuine horrors of the Jim Crow South. There is a satisfying poetic justice in using a racist’s work to lampoon white supremacy. If the equation of moral monsters with literal ones, such as the show’s lamprey-faced Lovecraftian “shoggoths,” seems heavy-handed, it must be said that we don’t usually look to CGI-intensive fantasy programming for subtlety, anyway.
It’s dispiriting, though, to witness the show’s fawning critical reception. Lovecraft Country has a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite a 74% user rating based on three times as many reviews. It has been rapturously hyped by just about every media outlet you can name, but many critics are too busy genuflecting to its timely themes and indispensable history lessons to assess it as a television show, which is, after all, their job. This is as patronizing an approach as it is a pious one. Having cringed through the first five episodes, I have to wonder if these critics realize that an inspired conceit is no guarantee of a watchable execution.
It’s hardly fair to criticize the show’s storyline. It riffs on both the style and the substance of Weird Tales-era pulp fiction, so it’s duty-bound to be silly and melodramatic. It features a dashing hero, Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors); a feisty love interest, Letitia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett-Bell); a Virgil-like mentor, Atticus’s uncle George Freeman (Courtney B. Vance); and a father figure, Montrose Freeman (Michael Kenneth Williams), with whom the hero has a complicated, antagonistic relationship. So far, so Indiana Jones—a franchise from which the writers borrow in a spirit of gleeful homage. For Spielberg’s Nazis, we have racist police; for the sinister cultists of Temple of Doom, we have a secret society that’s equal parts Explorers Club, Aleister Crowley, and Ku Klux Klan. This is a pretty damn good setup, so where does it go wrong?
The show’s pacing is chaotic, and it shifts abruptly and wildly in tone. Instead of the slow burn of a gradually unfolding mystery, we get episodes that could and should have been elaborated into whole seasons. Episode one ends with a terrifying forest bloodbath; episode two opens with a montage of the main characters, who have spent the previous night being hounded out of a racist “sundown town” and attacked by actual monsters, dancing around a mansion to the Jeffersons theme song. The same episode ends with an orgy of CGI and feels like the grand finale of a minor Marvel property, but then episode three arrives with Leti blithely fixing up the house she’s just purchased in a white neighborhood of Chicago. In a Lovecraft story, the characters are forever being driven mad by the wholesale collapse of reality as they know it; in Lovecraft Country, they just sort of shrug and wait for the next round of Ghostbusters outtakes.
The show does improve somewhat. Episode three, in which Leti’s proposed boarding house turns out to be haunted not only by racist neighbors but also by ghosts, would have supplied a good season arc. Episode five offers up an imaginative reworking of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before plummeting into a revenge fantasy that manages to be both sadistic and tedious. But Lovecraft Country never achieves anything like focus or momentum. It tries to have things too many ways. The dialogue that’s cheesy on purpose—Lovecraftian twaddle about the “Book of Names” or the “Language of Adam”—makes the serious dialogue cheesy by association. A clip of a James Baldwin speech or Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” feel like they’ve been thrown in to lend gravitas to a production that ought to be reveling in its essential horror-movieness.
Lovecraft Country takes its audience’s approval too much for granted. Like lots of mediocre art on the right side of a historical or social issue, it knows that viewers will be reluctant to criticize it lest they seem to be undermining its message. The sort of IMDb user whining that the show is “preachy” (to whom, I wonder, is it off-putting to preach against racism?) may be groping toward this point: It’s a drag to feel browbeaten into praising art on nonaesthetic terms. Then again, the fans will insist, he might just be racist.
Too earnest to be pulp, too pulpy to support its emotional or artistic ambitions, Lovecraft Country mostly provides YA-style moral reinforcement in a YA-style package. It may have sorta graphic sex, very graphic violence, and a solid grasp of the real history buttressing its Lovecraftian horror, but at bottom, it’s a children's show, not, like HBO’s vastly better Watchmen, a serious examination of compelling personalities struggling under oppression. The disturbing thing is that our film culture, steeped as it is in superhero movies, stock characters, cartoonish villains, and mind-numbing special effects, seems so ill-equipped to tell the difference.