Hard on the huge success of his genre-bending horror movie “Get Out” (The New York Times called it an “exhilaratingly smart and scary freakout about a black man in a white nightmare”), Jordan Peele is teaming up with Bad Robot and writer/showrunner Misha Green to turn the thematically similar novel Lovecraft Country into a series pilot for HBO.
According to Deadline Hollywood,
There is connective tissue to Peele’s breakout genre feature Get Out, which brought a Black Lives Matter theme to the horror genre. Lovecraft Country, the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, focuses on 25-year-old Atticus Black. After his father goes missing, Black joins up with his friend Letitia and his Uncle George to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America to find him. This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the malevolent spirits that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback. The goal is an anthological horror series that reclaims genre storytelling from the African-American perspective.
The AV Club had this to say about Ruff’s novel.
Here is a book heavily indebted to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, he of Cthulhu and other monstrous creations, but one where the biggest danger the heroes face is the color of their skin.
. . . Lovecraft fans will undoubtedly find countless references and allusions; most obviously, there’s a Necronomicon-style Book Of Names and the Order Of The Ancient Dawn—the kind of name that would get any pulp lover’s heart aflutter.
Reminder: This is a NecronomiCon year, August 17-20.
‘Lovecraft Country’ for sale at the Lovecraft Arts & Science Council, Arcade Providence, 65 Weybosset Street, (directions)