What Lovecraft Country Can Do About a Problem Like H.P. Lovecraft
Every genre has its giants: the titans who by talent, luck, or circumstance came to occupy a hulking branch on literature’s genealogical tree, to be cited and revisited by all who come after. Most of them are white men—primarily because of the luck and favorable circumstances that have historically been afforded to them—and most of those white men are flawed. But H.P. Lovecraft, the 20th century writer who launched 1,000 weird ships, stands out even by the insultingly low, "it was a different time" standards these white men are often judged by.
Lovecraft’s bigotry isn’t lying beneath the surface as much as embedded in the fabric of his writing; it’s a feature, not a bug. As Jurnee Smollett, the actress behind Lovecraft Country’s Letitia “Leti” Wright, said in a recent interview with Town & Country, “The racism, the bigotry comes through.” Misha Green, the series’ showrunner, agrees: “It’s right there in the text.”
Lovecraft Country, the new HBO series adapted from Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name, leaves no doubt in the viewer’s mind about Lovecraft’s bigotry. As if to preemptively silence the “It was a different time” dogmatists, the show has lead character Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) recalls the author’s poem “On the Creation of N*ggers” near the start of its first episode. No amount of overwrought justification can unwrite that poem—even if, as Atticus’s uncle says, it’s “one of Lovecraft’s we don’t hear mentioned often.”
Especially after hearing that poem, it’s tempting to simply cut ties—to strike Lovecraft’s work from syllabi, take his books out of print, never make a Cthulhu reference again. And in some cases, that might make sense; there’s not necessarily a reason why we have to keep doling out awards with his name. (Indeed, the World Fantasy Award statue is no longer modeled in Lovecraft’s image.) But to erase him is to erase our own failures; he was just as abhorrent in the decades when he was revered as he is now, when non-genre fans might first learn about him through the lens of Lovecraft Country.
“I think there’s a danger when the truth is distorted, when our history’s overlooked,” Smollett said. “When we hold these thinkers and writers—or founding fathers, whomever they are—up on a pedestal, and don’t tell the entirety of the story… To me, as a lover of history, I think it’s important to preserve the whole story, the whole truth. And it’s up to the individual how they process that.”
The whole truth is that Lovecraft was, as Allan Moore writes in the introduction to 2014’s The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, “an unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread.” The author, as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, Protestant man, was the embodiment of the entrenched elite—the people “most threatened” by the country’s demographic shifts and evolving cultural norms. His work is so unshakeable, Moore suggests, precisely because he provides an unvarnished look at our own American nightmare.
Green is a longtime horror fan, and familiar with both Lovecraft’s enduring mark on the genre, and his despicable philosophy. “You can look at what’s good, say that’s dope and it did influence the genre; you can also look at that he was a massive racist and say that is a problem,” she said. “And here we are now, creating art to move forward.”
What is powerful about Lovecraft Country is not just that it reclaims Lovecraft’s influential works—creates, as Green calls it, “art to move forward”—but that it flips the script on them. Lovecraft’s horror was borne from white Americans’ malignant, baseless fear of the other—of Black people, of Latinx people, of immigrants, of Jews. Lovecraft Country’s horror is borne from a fear of the very real violence that results when people like Lovecraft are enabled. It’s not new for Black writers to use the trappings of science fiction and fantasy to elucidate their persecution, but the re-appropriation of Lovecraft’s own monsters goes a step further, knocking the author from his long-held pedestal while still keeping him in full view. It clips Cthulhu’s wings, sets the shoggoths on their own creator.
And it creates something new for us to reckon with. "One of the beautiful things about science fiction is it expands your imagination. It makes you a dreamer, so you can see things outside of your current reality," Smollett said. "It’s a very bold and audacious thing to dream, to have an expanded imagination."
Lovecraft, titan of science fiction and fantasy, undone by imagination.
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