“Lovecraft Country,” premiering Aug. 16 on HBO, follows a Black family entangled in eldritch phenomena. Based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, the series is a sideways look at the terrors of Jim Crow America that nods to and reframes the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the widely cited if narrowly read pulp fiction writer from the early 20th century.
Broadly — and with plenty of exceptions — Lovecraft’s stories suggest huge and unfathomable horrors lurking just beneath the surface of the mundane world. Filled with miscegenation, tentacles and unspeakable dread, his works often begin with ordinary or ordinary-seeming men drawn into extraordinary and otherworldly situations. Almost no one gets out alive or sane. His brand of weird is gooey and misanthropic, with an insistence that the universe is at best indifferent to human life and at worst antagonistic.
To adapt a Lovecraft work is to reckon with a troubled and troubling legacy — blatant racism and sexual phobias blight much of his work. Still, he remains influential, with his sinister, squishy qualities still felt across media — television, film, fiction, comics, video games, role-playing games, visual art, plushies — and multiple genres. The stomach monster from “Alien”? Extremely Lovecraft. That giant squid from “Watchmen”? Lovecraft again. The devouring Shoggoths from the “Lovecraft Country” pilot? A squelching tip of the hat.
If you don’t know your Yog-Sothoth from your Shub-Niggarath — good! Run while you can! But if you hold your sanity lightly, here is a brief guide to the man, the monsters and the popular culture slime trail his works have left behind.
The Man
Born in Providence, R.I., in 1890, to a well-off family who quickly tumbled down the social ladder, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a precocious child who became a deeply strange adult. (When both of your parents die in the same psychiatric hospital, two decades apart, maybe that’s not a huge surprise.) After leaving high school during his senior year, a move precipitated by a nervous collapse, he began to write short stories indebted to Edgar Allan Poe, and dabbled in amateur journalism as well as racist and xenophobic poetry.
He devoted himself to horror fiction just after World War I, creating unsettling and often interrelated stories, many of them published in the pulp magazine “Weird Tales.” He married, briefly, and spent a few years living in Brooklyn, a period that inspired stories like “The Horror at Red Hook.” When his marriage ended, he returned to Providence, where he expanded into novellas like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “At the Mountains of Madness.”
Many of his stories, which favor abstruse language and archaic spelling, take place in an invented region of Massachusetts that his disciples would later christen Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft’s fiction reveals strange preoccupations — slime, crustaceans, the revelation of forbidden knowledge. A profound discomfort with sex runs through several stories; others display a deep-dyed racism, with nonwhite characters used as examples of barbarism. His fiction and ghost writing paid poorly and Lovecraft died in poverty in 1937.
The Mythos
Lovecraft created a genre of his own, cosmic horror or “cosmicism.” Think nihilism, with occasional cephalopods.
The basic idea: Humans are an irrelevancy within the greater universe, a cosmos governed by forces so alien and terrifying that our tiny minds cannot encompass or bear their knowledge. Most characters who glimpse it promptly go insane. Cosmicism’s big bad is Cthulhu, a winged, octopus-like ancient god. But Cthulhu and his associates aren’t so much evil as indifferent to pesky human life.
As pantheons go, Lovecraft’s cosmogony is fairly imprecise, with much of it enfleshed by his immediate disciple, August Derleth, and other writers. There are Great Old Ones, the Outer Gods, the Elder Things and assorted monsters like the Shoggoth, a slave race of many-eyed, protoplasmic amoeba doodads. These gods are occasionally humanoid, but more often sluglike, piscine, crustacean, gelatinous or a lose-your-lunch buffet of unnamable horrors. Lovecraft typed these beings as explicitly extraterrestrial, though some are former rulers of the earth and still lurk within its depths and reaches. (So no more expeditions to Antarctica, OK?)
Gods to know and then run from in crazed terror: Dagon, a sea monster god; Nyarlathotep, a malign shape-shifter god, who appears sometimes in the form of a pharaoh and sometimes as an upsetting bat thing; Shub-Niggarath, a cloudlike lady god sometimes called “the Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young”; Yog-Sothoth, the “All-in-One and One-in-All,” a collection of glowing circles, but scary.
Five Essential Works
If Lovecraft remains a prized writer, that has more to do with the atmosphere his stories evoke than with the turgid prose. His pacing can be slow, his dialogue stilted, his humorlessness suffocating. But for a taste of his crawling chaos, here are some ghastly places to begin.
‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1936)
Dr. William Dyer, a professor of geology at Miskatonic University (think Harvard, but eerier), joins a trek to Antarctica in this harrowing novella. His team discovers frozen prehistoric life-forms. Then mayhem begins. Dyer uncovers the remnants of an ancient alien civilization, a race of Elder Things and intimations of an even greater evil waiting nearby.
‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928)
This twisty story follows a man piecing together various writings left behind by his recently deceased professor uncle. Had his uncle stumbled on a series of cults devoted to the worship of an Elder God? He had! Note Cthulhu’s big debut: “It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway.”
‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927)
A surveyor assigned to an odd corner of Arkham, Mass., discovers that a fallen meteorite has poisoned the local floral and fauna in this short story. The meteorite, which produces a color unlike any on the visible spectrum, affects humans, too, driving one farm family to depredation and death.
‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1929)
In this story set in Dunwich, Mass., strange things are afoot at the Whateley farmhouse. So strange that Wilbur Whateley tries to break into the Miskatonic library and steal a copy of the “Necronomicon,” an ancient spellbook. With Wilbur thwarted, an invisible horror begins to roam the countryside.
‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (1936)
A novella dripping in genre elements, this odd tale stars an unnamed 21-year-old college student who stops off in Innsmouth, a dumpy, insular fishing town. Our narrator notices that the locals have narrow heads, bulging eyes … and hey, are those gills?
Eight Uncanny Adaptations
Though Lovecraft’s influence echoes throughout popular culture, his works often resist successful adaptation. Disturbing and prim, his corpus demands adventurous artists who can embrace his sinister ambience while also cracking it open to allow fresh perspective and tone.
‘Alan Moore’s The Courtyard’ (2003) and ‘Neonomicon’ (2010-2011)
A gallimaufry of murder, conspiracy, bad drugs, worse sex magic and forcible impregnation by an alien fish thing, these limited series comics by the graphic novel genius and sometime magician Alan Moore have a staggering nightmare-per-page ratio. Moore also concocted the short story, “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?,” an unholy and delightful mash-up of Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse.
‘The Ballad of Black Tom’ (2016)
Like Ruff’s “Lovecraft Country,” Victor LaValle’s novella re-evaluates Lovecraft’s deeply racist preoccupations. This retelling of “The Horror of Red Hook,” centers a Black protagonist and particularizes Red Hook’s lower-class, immigrant denizens. Its dedication reads, “For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings.”
‘Color Out of Space’ (2019)
If you want to communicate the sheer, unreal horror of the universe, choose an unreal actor to do it. Nicolas Cage stars in Richard Stanley’s film adaptation, playing an alpaca farmer (just go with it) whose life goes awry when a meteor lands. “Stanley and Cage,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The Times, “leap so far over the psychological top that they never come back to earth.”
‘Meddling Kids: A Novel’ (2017)
What if Scooby and the Gang grew up and faced Cthulhu? In Edgar Cantero’s allusive, inventive comedy-crime-horror pastiche, three young adults and one trusty dog return to the haunts of their youth to confront an old — like, Great Old Ones old — enemy. Zoinks!
‘Re-Animator' (1985)
A film adaptation of “Herbert West — Reanimator,” set in contemporary Chicago, this horror comedy centers on Herbert West, a medical student with some funny ideas about the Hippocratic oath. A shock-a-minute gore fest, the movie became a cult classic. Here’s Pauline Kael’s take: “The bloodier it gets, the funnier it gets.”
‘Winter Tide’ (2017) and ‘Deep Roots’ (2018)
Like Ruff and LaValle, Ruthanna Emrys also works a reclamation of the Lovecraft legacy. These two novels focus on Aphra March, a former Innsmouth resident who recently survived an internment camp. Because the U.S. government does not trust gill people. Emrys’s work humanizes Lovecraft’s monster, laying his xenophobia bare.
