Sorry I was a slowpoke. Here we go!
-Lovecraft Country (2016)
-The Destroyer of Worlds:
A Return to Lovecraft Country (2023)
-Lovecraft Country (2020)
Said world being the Jim Crow 50's, but with magic.
Our heroes/heroines are 99.99% black. There's one weird sorta-exception.
The show is an alternate-alternate world to the first book that even has shout-outs to the book world in a wild sci-fi way.
The cast is ensemble in the books. Atticus Turner dominates more in the show.
The show is more explicitly Lovecraft connected with actual Shoggoths showing up.
The books kind of dance the edge, and just give shout-outs to similar things in the HPL stories.
You don't have to read the book to watch the show, and vice versa.
But! Your enjoyment is enhanced if you gobble it all up.
Easter eggs reveal themselves.
Our baddies in both universes are a secret order of rich racist alchemists.
Basically, 50's versions of today's fucking tech-bros, but with spells and amulets.
Something about being rich makes you a piece of shit.
I dunno what happens. Maybe too much money ink makes your brain go toxic.
So, yeah, a lot of the problems encountered by our heroes we're still dealing with now.
Very timely.
I loved every scrap of it. None of it disappointed.
There's just degrees of love.
I liked season 1 of the show better than book 1.
I liked book 2 better than season 1.
Season 2 would have been really radical and ambitious, and shamelessly political, and HBO chickened out.
Couldn't handle it. We were robbed as a culture.
I want to be in the alternate-alternate-alternate world where we got season 2.
Well, we might get book 3, but if Matt Ruff goes at the pace it took to get to book 2, we won't see it 'til 2030. We'll very likely all be in the Trump death camps by then. 😒
Well!! All the more reason I'm glad there's all these other rebuttal-quels to catch up with!
😎👍
Jeroboam Henley’s Debt (1982)
By Charles R. Saunders.
The real first black protagonists injected into the Lovecraft-verse.
The actual Lovecraft-verse, not meta.
I knew in my marrow this had to exist somewhere, and it did, and I found it.
I'm only sad it took 'til the 80's. Seems like it should have and could have been sooner.
It's a teeny little 10 page story. It's mostly bound up in anthologies. Right now, you can get it in "The Book Of Cthulhu" which is what I used for the cover.
You can read it on free PDF. Google the title followed by "PDF" and you'll find it.
I read it that way. You'll blast right through it.
It's set in the 20's, like a usual Lovecraft story.
It's got two erudite guys sitting in a study talking, and we build to the horror.
All the usual HPL formula tropes are there.
But, where our heroes this time are black, they had to struggle their way through a sea of dirty cops to get to the house to have their little gentleman's talk.
It has an eye twinkling humor to it that doesn't quite go all the way to satire.
It's got political anger to it without quite shaking a fist, and throwing a Molotov.
And...it's got a grim dark bittersweet authentic Lovecraft type ending.
As the prototype granddaddy to the rebuttal-quels, I was pleased.
Great stuff.
I only wish it was longer.
But, I've got "Black Tom" coming up, and I'm sure that'll deliver the goods.
And, that's those!
Next: Lovecraft vs Batman!!
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