Just how much Lovecraft can be found in Lovecraft Country, the new HBO series based on the 2016 novel of the same title by Matt Ruff?

The series, developed by showrunner Misha Green (who co-created the 2016 historical series Underground), soon resolves itself into a supernatural soap opera, but its primary subject—life as a Black person struggling under the weight of systemic American racism—remains acutely pertinent to Lovecraft’s work.

The racism of Howard Phillips Lovecraft was extreme even for its time, and like Ruff’s novel, the series quotes from a particularly vile poem Lovecraft wrote in 1912, one with the title “On the Creation of N—–s” that only gets more racist from there.

Lovecraft’s published and private writing exhibits the same revulsion toward people of color that his characters lavish on the “mongrel” mer-tribes of his fiction.

Set in the 1950s, Lovecraft Country depicts the family and friends of Atticus Turner (related to Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in 1831, and played by Jonathan Majors in the series) and their run-ins with a secret society of rich white occultists calling themselves the Order of the Ancient Dawn.

While Atticus escapes the sorcerer’s New England compound and returns to his native Chicago, he and the people he’s closest to continue to have their lives and fates manipulated by the cult as its members jockey for supreme power.

Lovecraft Country is really a series of linked stories in which Atticus and the people in his orbit each engage with a pulp fiction trope inflected by the dilemmas of the racial caste system.

Atticus must confront the fact that his Black ancestor was raped by his white ancestor.

Letitia’s sister Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) meets a man who supplies her with a potion that temporarily changes her into a white woman.

The TV series changes the story even further, until all that remains of Lovecraft is the pun in the story’s title.

In the book and the series, these creatures are identified as shoggoths, beings that once served Lovecraft’s elder gods.

But Lovecraft’s shoggoths are not lithe, pouncing, velociraptorlike predators with infectious bites, like those in the series!

The aficionado will scour HBO’s version of Lovecraft Country in vain for knowing and clever references to Lovecraft’s mythos, but the series does preserve something of the novel’s original notion: that for Atticus and those close to him, people simply trying to survive in a highly imperfect world and who are treated as pawns by the powerful white characters, there’s no need to look to the far reaches of the universe or the depths of the ocean to find unfathomable, senseless, gibbering evil.