Lovecraft Country might just be the neatest deconstruction of Lovecraft there is, though.
Lovecraft had a deep, deep fear of anything different or unusual. His stories touted the horrors of, among other things, air conditioning, colors outside the visible spectrum, and non-euclidean geometry. But one that he kept coming back to was race. His view of race and the importance of racial purity was intense even for his time, and the idea that he might have âimpureâ (read:Welsh) blood in his family was the inspiration for Shadow over Innsmouth. Racism was the order through which Lovecraft made his world and its dissolution his bane, and while he make some progress later in life (thanks in part to less radical friends and his Jewish wife who persistently challenged his views of her people), the idea of race as the ultimate order permeates his stories. People of color either worship his eldritch abominations or are eldritch themselves. The worst montrosity is the idea of these people interacting with good, white folks (and he had a much narrower definition of white than we have today), or even worse, having relationships with them. Merely bumping into a black guy is certain doom. And so on, and so forth.
Lovecraft Country, on the other hand, persistently shows the reality of racism, and it is thus: racism is the ultimate disorder. No law, no rule, no norm is exempt from it. Sheriff Hunt breaks his own laws to get at the black protagonists, making a mockery of his own profession to pursue them. Samuel Braithwaite breaks his own orderâs rules when they appear to favor Atticus, a black man. Not even white people are safe from the cancer of racism: take Ms. Lydia, killed for running an equal diner in a non-segregated state. The idea that a personâs moral character or personal worth can be judged based on physical characteristics is a profound disconnect from the reality of humanity, and the effort to maintain the illusion simply causes that rot to spread into the foundation of society itself. Even the most monstrous creatures in the series follow rules, follow order: shoggoths dislike light, the ritual can be disrupted, ghosts may be appeased. Racism doesnât. It comes from disorder and creates disorder. Lovecraftâs privilege kept him insulated from it, but the truth is that the thing he saw as the ultimate order was the source of chaos beyond his imagining, and Lovecraft Country hammers that in at every turn, from the white supremacist secret society to the eerily Innsmouth-like behavior of white towns who feel their turf has been infringed on.
And quite frankly? Thatâs a more thought-provoking, insightful, and interesting take on Lovecraftâs stories than any McCthulhu ripoff could ever be.
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