365NEWSX
365NEWSX
Subscribe

Welcome

‘Lovecraft Country’: A Nightmare on Main Street - Rolling Stone

‘Lovecraft Country’: A Nightmare on Main Street - Rolling Stone

‘Lovecraft Country’: A Nightmare on Main Street - Rolling Stone
Aug 07, 2020 2 mins, 18 secs

Atticus “Tic” Freeman, the young Korean War veteran hero of HBO’s fantastic — in every sense of the word — new drama Lovecraft Country, has a weakness for pulp stories.

As he puts it, “I love that the heroes get to go on adventures in other worlds, defy insurmountable odds, defeat the monster, save the day.” But he’s also painfully aware that these tales rarely have room for someone who looks like him.

Lovecraft, was also a vile bigot who once wrote a poem comparing black men to “beasts” filled with vice.

Abrams, Tic gets a chance to live out a plot just like the ones in his beloved sci-fi and fantasy novels.

Montrose has gone missing, so Tic, George, and Tic’s old friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett) pile into George’s woody wagon to rescue him — little realizing that his predicament will involve demons, shape-shifters, and, oh, yeah, white supremacists who can cast magic spells.

The Freemans and Leti are alternately threatened and aided by Christina (Abbey Lee, below) and William (Jordan Patrick Smith), a mysterious duo who look like the whitest, blondest people ever put into existence, much less on television, and the series soon begins to argue that whiteness itself can seem like a superpower when you’re black in a country with so much racism coursing through its veins.

It’s not just that the Freemans love pulp and related entertainment (George’s daughter Diana, played by Jada Harris, makes her own comic books, featuring black heroes with names like Panther Man), while Leti and her sister Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) are passionate about the blues.

Lovecraft Country itself is a collage of influences and time periods, traveling backward through America’s history of racial atrocities (Montrose looks at a fire and mutters, “Smells like Tulsa”), then forward to consider the many hopeful moments and disappointments from the decades that follow Tic and Leti’s journey.

(Can you blame her? She’s one of only a handful of black series creators in HBO’s long and otherwise progressive history.) After the road trip in search of Montrose, there’s a crackerjack haunted-house story, and an Indiana Jones-esque hunt for treasure buried underneath a museum.

So much is happening, all so stylishly presented, that each episode feels like it could last twice as long and not get dull(*)?

(*) It helps that, after the road-trip two-parter that begins the series, the stories are more standalone than is normal for a complicated Peak TV drama like this

Lovecraft Country lands in a specific time and place for both, but in a way that feels universal as much as it feels scary

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED