TV Review by Kerey McKenna.
Four years ago I reviewed Matt Ruff’s horror novel Lovecraft Country here on Nerds Who Read in my first year of officially posted reviews to the blog. Despite not generally being a horror aficionado, I was really moved by its novel take on Lovecraftian Horror, using cosmic horror tropes and themes to explore historical racism in America. I have revisited it several times in the past four years, perhaps because as I mentioned in my review, a good portion of the novel is episodic. Although there is a clear narrative arc for the novel, I would revisit individual chapters like I would episodes of an anthology such as Bradbury’s October Country, Netflix’s Black Mirror, or The Twilight Zone. As a result, I was very excited when the novel was fast tracked for an adaptation into a television series by HBO and given the Sunday night timeslot and budget of their other recent science fiction and fantasy hit series and mini-series. I can say, Dear Readers, that based on the strong premiere episode “Sundown,” the rush to adapt seems to be driven by a true passion with everyone involved to get this story out to a wider audience.
For those of you who wish to go into the series with as little knowledge or preconceptions as possible, and have not read the book, I would recommend not reading past this paragraph until you’ve watched the show. I will say that I found the premiere episode to be a compelling work of historical fiction, and as the series ramps up, I expect that the science fiction elements will be used to explore this time in American history from an African-American perspective. Much as I did with my review earlier this year of The Plot Against America, this review will summarize a lot of the events of the first episode and point out (based on my recollections from the novel) some of the foreshadowing that is taking place. Also, just as with my reviews of Plot Against America and Hunters, the real world history concerns relatively recent history but it is still before “my time”, and concerns groups that I cannot speak on behalf of, so as much as genre fiction like this helps build understanding, there may be subtle references, nuances, or errors that I am missing.
Okay. For everyone that is still with me, here is my breakdown of the first episode. Unlike other previous HBO genre shows, there is no elaborate...credits...sequence to set the tone for the series. Instead the viewer is thrown into the chaos of a very confusing battle sequence.
What starts out as a gritty black and white Korean War movie transitions first to color and then into peak 1950s pulp science fiction with flying saucers, Martian tripods, and Greek hoplites. In addition to all these strange spectacles, the central character, an African-American Soldier (Jonathan Majors), seems to be bombarded with not just the sounds of battle, but an odd cacophony of nostalgic Americana and racist accusations. Next from out of the flying saucers beams down Dejah Thoris, the original exotically hued space babe in a bikini and the titular “Princess of Mars” from the John Carter pulp novels. Just as the American soldier and his Barsoomian lover are about to have a “Close Encounter,” H.P. Lovecraft’s breakout star, Cthulhu himself, rears his ugly, tentacle-mawed head. But fortunately the monstrosity is struck down by an American hero, Jackie Robinson, taking to the battlefield in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform and swinging his mighty bat against the eldritch monster...
And then the soldier wakes up from his dream, and comes to in the segregated section of a bus traveling out of Kentucky in the 1950s…
I have to admit the over the top opening sequence, which does not appear in the book, initially gave me some apprehension about how faithful to the novel this series was going to be. However given the rest of the premiere—and a second viewing—I appreciate the creators opening up with such a spectacular tableau. It works as a great homage to the science fiction of the 1950s where more often than not it seems a novel or comic book would have a salacious and absurd cover to draw the customer’s eye on the news stand.
Perhaps the intro is also needed to assure viewers that yes, there is going to be science fiction fantasy in the coveted HBO science fiction fantasy Sunday night slot, because much of the first episode is played as straight up historical fiction and not science fiction.
That is not to say we do not see science fiction and fantasy at all. Atticus Freeman, the soldier that we met on the bus, is a voracious reader of science fiction fantasy, so it makes sense that his subconscious is a whirling combination of flying saucers and the Korean War that he just left. As he explains to a fellow black traveler as they walk down a country road (their bus broke down and no white motorists have deigned to give them a ride to the next town), when he was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he was very much in need of escapist fantasy. Upon reflection, some of these stories contain some pretty serious flaws that he has to reconcile with. And reconciling with elements of a troubled past, warts and all, is very much on his mind as he is returning home to Chicago because his estranged and abusive father, Montrose Freeman (Michael Kenneth Williams), has gone missing.
In the novel, the first several chapters are framed solely from the perspective of Atticus, with later chapters changing the point of view to other characters who are his friends and family. The series premiere does a very good job at establishing from the start that while Atticus is a central hero, this is going to be a story with an ensemble cast. We meet Atticus’s Uncle George (Courtney B Vance), Aunt Hyppolyta (Aunjanue Ellis), and young cousin Diana, “Dee” (Jada Harris). In the novel, George and Hyppolyta’s child was a boy named Horace, but the gender swap and name change do set up an allusion to another great character in sci-fi fantasy. Just as in the novel, the youngest Freeman is an avid reader of comic books. With no black comic book heroes at the newsstand, Diana authors and draws her own and bases the heroes on the role models she sees in her life, chiefly her mother and father. Atticus’s Uncle George runs the Safe Negro Travel Agency and publishes a guide that lists businesses throughout the country that will accommodate African-American travelers. In addition to her duties as home maker and editor for the travel guide, Hyppolyta is an amateur astronomer who does as much stargazing as she can from a Chicago apartment. My educated suspicion is that when she asks George to start traveling the country with him for his work, she is hoping to bring her telescope to some wide open spaces with far less light pollution.
We are also introduced to the Atticus’s childhood friends, sisters Letitia “Leti” Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) and Ruby Baptiste (Wunmi Mosaku). The introduction of the sisters is a great example of how changes in adaptations can build upon the source material and strengthen it using the new medium. In this case, not only are both sisters introduced earlier than in the novel, their introduction has an excellent musical component. Throughout the premiere so far the sound track (both diegetic and non-diegetic) has been helping to build the setting. When Atticus wakes from his dream, it’s fittingly enough to the sounds of “Sh-Boom Sh-Boom,” which not only concerns dreams, but is an example of more mainstream, white-directed doo-wop. As Atticus and the story get back to the Chicago Southside, the radio switches to 1950s black artists (and the sound track sneaks in a bit of contemporary Hip Hop in for the audience). When we first meet Ruby, she is center stage at the neighborhood block party doing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe number and very much invoking Rosetta’s style and iconic electric guitar. Then prodigal child Leti comes to the party and joins Ruby in raucous rendition of “Whole Lotta Shaken Goin’ On.”
After their literal sister act, Ruby and Leti leave the stage and have a tense exchange, and we see a bit more about how the two sisters contrast and the tensions between them. Ruby stayed in the neighborhood and works as domestic help for whites, whereas Leti has been away for years traveling. Also Leti seems to take big swings at life. She doesn’t want to work as a maid. If pressed for steady work, she will apply for the uptown department stores, more prestigious work that so far Ruby has not been able to break into. Leti wants to pioneer (own property in a traditionally white neighborhood), a bold statement (made all the more bold by the fact that she is currently short on funds and asking to crash at Ruby’s place). The more grounded Ruby doesn't want to take that risk. As I mentioned, the introduction of the sisters is a bit different here than in the book and I think it’s for the better. In the novel we are only introduced to Ruby as a bit of a wet blanket when compared to the adventurers Leti. Here however, Ruby is shown to be fun and vivacious in her own right but perhaps a bit more grounded and responsible than Leti. Also in the casting of the actresses, there are some visual implications why Leti feels more confident that she can get a job in the fancy uptown department store, a point that I did not quite key into until I listened to an interview with one of the writers on the show’s official podcast.
After the block party, the search for Atticus’ missing father begins in earnest. A somewhat out of character note left by Montrose says that he was tracking down an important part of their lost family history and that he is waiting for his son in Ardham, Massachusetts. Atticus initially mistakes Ardham for Arkham, the fictional town in which many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories of New England horror were often set. Then again, what scant information they can find about the town does not dissuade them from the notion that this is a locale out of a horror story. Ardham and its surrounding towns in “Devon'' county are isolated, it would seem deliberately, in the Massachusetts backwoods and employ a notoriously sadistic sheriff to keep people out. Those who care to look are noticing a growing pile of missing persons reports, people who may have been passing through Devon, presumably running afoul of this backwoods sheriff and his deputies, or perhaps “wild animals” as the county is so underdeveloped.
An important part of Lovecraft Country is baked into its title as the country in question isn’t just the genre of Lovecraftian horror, but its setting of New England itself. Often discussions of segregation in America focus entirely on the South and omit the formal and informal systems of segregation and white supremacy in the Midwest and New England.
I must admit, before I read the novel I was somewhat familiar with the idea of a “Sundown Town,” where the white population insisted that most blacks working in it be out of the city by sundown...but it was not a shame that I had associated with New England. As Atticus and George Freeman head east, with Leti tagging along, we see tableaus from a segregated America and hear a portion of a speech by James Baldwin on blacks and the “American Dream.” Baldwin describes how systems of oppression create alternate “realities” for the oppressor and the oppressed that are pernicious and difficult to dismantle, because the participants come to see them as natural and not constructed.
As the trio get closer to their destination, the dangers and the strangeness grow. When being chased out of a small town by white vigilantes, the heroes are saved by a mysterious Deus ex Machina, a silver car that somehow brings their pursuers to a screeching halt by means Atticus cannot explain.
Almost to their destination, but with the sun hanging low in the sky, the party is lost in the woods and trying to find the country road that will get them into Ardham. Getting out to stretch their legs, Atticus jokes with Leti that maybe some noise that startled her in the underbrush is a “Shoggoth,” one of H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters. And as if summoned by the talk of monsters, a police prowler car drives around the bend and the series crosses the county line from historical fiction into horror.
I am not going to provide a breakdown of the final sequence in the woods of Ardham except to say that it does a great job of building upon what has come before, both thematically and in paying off set ups established earlier, even as it drastically changes the status genre from historical into the horrific and fantastical.
I hope that like other recent adaptations such as the Plot against America and Watchmen, the show runners are going to restrain themselves to making one excellent season of television, instead of drawing things out with potentially diminishing returns. But either way, I eagerly await the next installment of Lovecraft Country this coming Sunday.
Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, MA. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.
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