The story begins with a Black Korean War veteran named Atticus ( Jonathan Majors) going on a journey with his childhood friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett) and uncle George (Courtney B. The series seems to want to upend racial and sexual stereotypes by providing nuanced, complex characters but more often ends up reinforcing those same stereotypes, serving offensive messages about Blackness, queerness, sexuality and gender in tasteless, gratuitous ways. However, “Lovecraft Country” mostly delivers a muddled narrative with sloppy execution. In the show, which wrapped up its first season on Sunday, Lovecraftian terrors appear in 1950s Jim Crow America, where a Black family faces racism, wizardry and mystifying beasts. The HBO series “Lovecraft Country,” created by Misha Green and based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name, aimed to pull off a clever trick: to use Lovecraft’s themes (ancient cults, the cost of magic) and aesthetics (creeping dread, oozing monsters) to create a heroic narrative about the very race of people he so grossly reviled, and in the process expand the Black horror canon. Lovecraft was both a founding father of modern horror and a deeply committed racist, a symbolic portent of the general disregard the genre would have, for most of its history, for creators and performers of color. This essay includes spoilers for the first season of “Lovecraft Country.”
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