Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff was released in 2016. It is a thrilling story that detailed the lives of African Americans, and how they dealt with racism in the 50s. The novel is set to be adopted to television by HBO under the direction of Jordan Peele.
In the story, the protagonists, Atticus Turner and his Uncle George go cross country in order to find and rescue Atticus’s missing father, Montrose Turner, who was kidnapped by a secret society.
Secret societies, cults, human sacrifice, and hopelessness are all present in Lovecraft Country. It relates to the idea that in the large scale of things humans don’t really matter. It’s a theme explored quite vividly in many of Lovecraft’s stories. Lovecraft has explored a number of them from the Brotherhood of the Beast to Chorazo’s Cult. Groups such as these are an important element to Lovecraft’s style of horror.
Lovecraft Country worked tirelessly to merge many of the themes of hopelessness, sci-fi, and horror into 1950s America. Since many of Lovecraft’s stories were set in the 20s and 30s, it wasn’t a far stretch.
Director Jordan Peele will be helming the project for HBO and he has a difficult task ahead of him. For many directors, the themes associated by Lovecraft have been difficult to materialize into a successful project. One exception that comes to mind is John Carpenter’s The Thing. It shares many elements of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
But more often than not, Lovecraft based mythos has been extremely difficult for film makers to even get off the ground. Guillermo del Toro’s failure to get his film adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness is a recent example.
With Jordan Peele’s massive success with Get Out, a movie that explores similar elements in modern day America, he’s well prepared for the challenge. Also, since the movie will be given the HBO treatment it allows the film maker a much greater allowance of flexibility to bring the novel to life.
The series is expected to see the light of day either in late 2018 or early 2019. This might be pushed back a bit since currently, Peele is working on a Police Academy reboot. Depending on how long that movie takes to film, we might have to wait longer to see Lovecraft Country.