All Over the Map: Locating Genre in Lovecraft Country

Bethany Doane

The opening scene of 2020’s HBO series Lovecraft Country serves as a perfect microcosm of the series’ themes and generic origins. It begins in black-and-white, a war scene accompanied by an old-Hollywood cinematic score. Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) is an American soldier rushing through dark trenches until an explosion brings bright-orange color into the frame. “This is the story of a boy and his dream,” spliced narration from the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson Story proclaims. “But more than that, it is the story of an American boy and a dream that is truly American.” When Tic (Atticus) looks up, the world has gone to color, and he’s faced with a nightmarish alien landscape: Cthulhu-like monsters fly overhead while tripod robots fire lasers down into a burning city. Three bright-green UFOs dot the sky. From one of them, a beautiful alien woman with red skin floats to the ground to embrace Tic and then whisper something unintelligible and ominous into his ear. When one of the Cthulhu-monsters attacks, Jackie Robinson himself appears to cleave the creature in half, sporting a #42 Dodgers uniform now covered in green blood. “I gotcha, kid,” he says (“Sundown”).

This scene is a mishmash of pulpy tropes, literary allusion, and historical reference: Jackie Robinson, of course, but also H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the Roswell crash of 1947. It turns out to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, a dream sequence. But these first few minutes capture the thematic heart of Lovecraft Country: America is a land of monstrosity made bearable by the stories we tell and the heroes we conjure. The show is earnest in its appreciation for genre fiction, especially the pulps, but also critically aware of the relationship between narrative and ideology: it knows how much stories matter, both as places to reclaim one’s own truth, and as sites of ideological struggle.

Lovecraft Country is about re-mapping the history of the pulps, overlaying the narrative conventions of weird fiction and horror across the history of racism in twentieth-century America in much the same way that Diana (Jada Harris) draws monsters across the road atlas the characters use to chart their Safe Negro Travel Guide. Exposing the literary racism of pulp magazines and novels serves as a gateway for (re)telling the story of racism in America, and thus reconstructing a pulp tradition detached from its early racist representations. The show’s episodes jump all over the genre map, moving between science fiction, occult mystery, gothic horror, and exotic (read: vaguely imperialist) adventure, and are staged in various geographical locations across the U.S. and, for one episode, in South Korea.

Like Indiana Jones, I want to follow two little red lines across the series map. The first traces the history of weird fiction, of which Lovecraft is the best-known author, and its intersections with American racism. This literary and historical crossing is most prominent in the series’ first episode, “Sundown.” The second line contours the gothic horror of racial violence in America, which manifests in a few places, but perhaps most effectively in the eighth episode of the series, “Jig-a-Bobo.” Both of these episodes are quite aware of their own literary origins, and, in both cases, the series layers racial terror with the genre conventions of horror, not so that monstrosity can serve as a metaphor for racism, but such that the two forms of horror amplify one another. It’s an affective layering that renders the horror of racism visceral without sacrificing the occult and supernatural elements to mere metaphor.

 

Ardham, MA: The Weird

There’s something ironic about trying to define weird fiction, because so much of it is about what can’t be taxonomized: indescribable monsters, inhuman realms, unspeakable occult secrets, cosmic voids, and unknowable planets. Weird fiction is a hybrid mode, born in a time before genre solidification, at the end of the nineteenth century, and populating many the pulps of the 1920s and ‘30s. In works by Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, or H. P. Lovecraft, one finds narrative and generic elements of the gothic, science fiction, adventure, fantasy, and detective stories. If anything unites this early weird fiction, it is a sense of something strange and unsettling that exists beyond the realm of regular human experience and perception. Lovecraft Country conjures early weird fiction straight away in its first two episodes, both in direct references to Lovecraft and in the introduction of Braithwhite’s occult secret society, the Sons of Adam.

The “old weird” fiction of the early twentieth century (as opposed to “the new weird”)[i] is often marred by its association with reactionary politics—especially racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. Lovecraft Country is, of course, acutely aware of this troubling history, and confronts it right off the bat (so to speak). In the office of his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), Tic picks up a copy of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others, a memorial volume of the author’s best weird fiction.

“I’m surprised that one caught your interest,” George says. “Horror is usually my thing.”

“‘On the Creation of Ni__ers,’” Tic says, citing one of the author’s more infamously racist pieces.

“Now that’s one of Lovecraft’s we don’t hear mentioned often.”

The exchange serves as a segue into discussing Tic’s father, who has disappeared into “Lovecraft Country” (rural Massachusetts), but it also puts the author’s racism front and center. As George indicates, the tendency is to shy away from this fact, to overlook it in favor of the author’s less-obviously racist work. This series, however, refuses to look away. By locating real lived experiences of racism in a fictional America that coincides with the world of Lovecraft’s monsters and magic, the show exposes and amplifies both literary and racial histories. It corrects Lovecraft’s racism via perspective shift—through the eyes of Black characters—rather than turning away from the racist history of the weird.

Tic’s father is being held in Ardham, Massachusetts—a town meant to recall (and perhaps to be) Lovecraft’s fictional Arkham. George, Tic, and family friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett) set out to find the town, but they are ominously forewarned by both Diana’s drawing on the map and other information that the nearby town of Bideford was founded by witch-hunters and is occupied by virulent racists. As they pass through the “sundown county” of Devon, where being on the road (and Black) after dark could get them killed, Devon’s sheriff confronts them and not-so-subtly threatens them with lynching if they don’t get themselves over the county line before sunset—in just a few minutes.

What follows is a chase scene where the geography of racism is made literal, mapped onto the “sundown county” of Devon. The chase is intense and horrifying: the sheriff’s car barrels down behind them, crashing into their bumper. He is ready and more than willing to kill them if they either speed or fail to cross the county line in time. In a wash of relief, the trio’s car bumps over railroad tracks marking the county line, but their reprieve is short-lived. In a telling twist of fate, they encounter a road block where four armed cops wait for them. Racism, it seems, cannot be outrun.

The cops force the group into the woods, presumably, again, to lynch them, but in an ironic turn of the horror genre, they’re saved by the appearance of several shoggoths—Lovecraftian monsters. The creatures violently rip apart several police officers and force the remaining survivors deeper into the woods. What’s fascinating about this scene is its inversion of genre expectations: the racial terror is the source of fear, and the staple of the horror genre—the monster in the woods—becomes instead a kind of savior.

The forest is a familiar horror setting, and in this scene the fear the audience feels for Tic, Leti, and George is complicated by the more standard conventions of the horror genre: the cracking of branches, the sound of the monster’s footsteps, the sense of not being alone in the woods. There’s an affective shift, and a complication, that happens in viewing this scene, which situates the viewer’s affective response to literal monsters as less frightening than the terrors of racism.

The monsters are still scary—their razor-sharp teeth are still coming for everyone in those woods—but the juxtaposition of literal monstrosity with racist monstrosity produces a more layered affect that reveals the shoggoths for what they really are: relief, escape.

 

Chicago, IL: The Gothic

The gothic is a mode that utilizes specific aesthetic and narrative conventions (ghosts, the occult, haunted houses) to link personal, familial, or domestic trauma to “unspeakable” histories via specific geographies and architectures. In Lovecraft Country, the gothic’s geography lies where it usually does: at home. In this case, that means Chicago.

Gothic conventions appear in the third episode of the series, “Holy Ghost”—a haunted house episode also set in Chicago. But the eighth episode, “Jig-a-Bobo,” contains the most conventionally cinematic horror moments of the series. This episode embeds a real historical racial trauma, the murder of Emmett Till, into the plot of the series. Diana, or Dee, is George’s tween daughter and Till’s best friend. (She affectionately calls him “Bobo” in an earlier episode, so the historical connection isn’t made clear at first.) The episode opens at Till’s funeral on a miserable and hot summer day with, ironically, Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” playing in the background. Crowds line the streets, waiting to enter the building and pay their respects. Mourners who have seen the body stumble out to retch into buckets. Diana, in tears, tries to process her first real experience with the grief of racial violence, especially the way it can be, and has been, turned on children.

“Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to bring Dee,” Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) says.

“Ain’t no getting around this. Every Negro’s rite of passage in this country, child or not,” Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams) explains (and we learn in the next episode that he, too, lost a best friend as a child to racial violence).

But the adults aren’t paying attention to Diana herself. The sweating crowd closes in around her. Protesters shout. Sirens blare. Dee runs.

While Dee is out on her own, police Captain Lancaster (Mac Brandt), a member of the Sons of Adam, corners, confronts, and then curses her. Soon after, she’s stalked by the terrifying spirits of “Topsy and Bopsy,” allusions to the “pickaninny” character (Topsy) in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). These nightmarish, racist caricatures follow her across the city; she can’t escape them. Diana has been cursed, both metaphorically and literally, with the spectre of racial violence and stereotyping.

The scene where these spirits first appear—on a train platform—uses the framing, pacing, and sound design typical of contemporary horror films. Heavy string music builds in anticipation of their first appearance and then accelerates as they reveal themselves. The two figures emerge slowly from within a darkened doorframe, moving choppily and unnaturally. They bend and move their bodies in quick contortions, baring their teeth and red eyes. Diana reacts in horror, but no one else on the crowded platform can see them. This combination of the psychological and the historical is common to gothic stories, but once again Lovecraft Country presents a manifestly political component in a scene that literalizes racial horror. It uses the conventions of cinematic horror to amplify the terror of a racial violence that happens through both physical harm (Till’s murder) and cruel stereotyping.

Topsy is a minor character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who is described as “a little Negro girl, about eight or nine years of age,” followed by the following (surely haunting) image:

She was one of the blackest of her race; and her round, shining eyes, glittering as glass beads, moved with quick and restless glances over everything in the room. Her mouth, half open with astonishment at the wonders of the new Mas’r’s parlor, displayed a white and brilliant set of teeth. Her woolly hair was braided in sundry little tails, which stuck out in every direction. The expression of her face was an odd mixture of shrewdness and cunning, over which was oddly drawn, like a kind of veil, an expression of the most doleful gravity and solemnity. She was dressed in a single filthy, ragged garment, made of bagging; and stood with her hands demurely folded before her. Altogether, there was something odd and goblin-like about her appearance—something, as Miss Ophelia afterwards said, “so heathenish,” as to inspire that good lady with utter dismay…(260)

The characterization of the child as “goblin-like,” and “heathenish,” not to mention filthy, odd, and cunning, is not even far-removed from the horrifying picture presented in Lovecraft Country. Thus, literary history echoes forward in this gothic representation that takes racist characterization to its most grotesque extreme.

In an article for Den of Geek, Nicole Hill says about this scene,

Topsy and Bopsy are what all Black children look like to racist white folks, something wicked and less than human. It is possible Lancaster chose this specific imagery to project his vision of Diana onto her. But it is more likely that Diana, in response to the trauma of losing her best friend to racial violence, manifested her fear of what she looks like to the outside world as an angry, tired, traumatized, Black girl.

What’s important here is that Topsy and Bopsy are not metaphors for racial violence or harmful racial stereotyping. They are not symbols or allegorical figures so much as literalizations. This distinction is important because metaphor and allegory create a critical distance in the reader or viewer that diminishes the power of horror to disrupt and disturb. The process of interpreting the symbol takes away the frightening affective power of the monster. Instead, like the juxtaposition of police violence with the shoggoths in episode one, it is a both/and situation: the monster is real, a material manifestation of racism itself, conjured into being by racist magic, or what Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields might call “racecraft.”

By layering the conventions of horror that emerge from early pulp traditions and the gothic over the real horrors of racial violence, Lovecraft Country retells the story of genre, mapping it onto the racist history of America. What this journey across horror’s origins shows us is that Lovecraft’s country is our country, and its racist history is our own.

 

Notes:

[i] For some definitions and examples, see Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s edited collection, The New Weird.

 

Works Cited:

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso Books, 2012.

Green, Misha, creator. Lovecraft Country. HBO, 2020.

Hill, Nicole. “How Lovecraft Country Uses Topsy and Bopsy to Address Racist Caricatures.” Den of Geek, 7 Oct. 2020.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, editors. The New Weird. Tachyon, 2008.

Wester, Maisha L. African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.