Lovecraft Country is coming to HBO and I am here for it

[SeamusBellamy]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/22/hbolovecraft.html

…

[joelfinkle]

Seriously, read the damn book. I doubt it will ruin your enjoyment of the series – it’s a set of interconnected stories, but I anticipate the series will probably run with one thread and not explore some of the other characters. It’s pretty brilliant stuff (compared with Sewer, Gas and Electric which I found to be a lot of fun but perhaps too silly, trying too hard to be an Illuminatus! pastiche). It all boils down to this: Is racism worse than the return of the elder gods?

[Sabocat]

Lovecraft would hate this.
WHICH IS GREAT!

[anonotwit]

Ruff is great at coming up with these fantastic premises, but I didn’t think Lovecraft Country worked as well as a novel. The book was written as a series of interconnected stories, which did a great job of showing the problems caused by the racism faced by its characters, but I think it also made it less compelling as a novel.

Having said that, it was better than a lot of novels I read that year, it got the point across pretty damn well and I think the episodic nature of the book will translate well to television. I have my fingers crossed, but I think the series could end up being much better than the book.

Another Matt Ruff novel with a great premise was The Mirage, which takes place in an alternate universe where the United Arab States is a superpower, North America is split between a bunch of poor feuding nations and Christian terrorists have bombed Baghdad’s World Trade Center. We also see a bunch of this world’s figures in alternate roles (Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein). I felt that Ruff spent too much time on his world-building here and not enough on his characters, but (although Lovecraft Country was still much better) it was worth reading.

[JasonBass]

i read it years ago and loved it. been waiting for this series forever!

[Brainspore]

@joelfinkle

Seriously, read the damn book. I doubt it will ruin your enjoyment of the series – it’s a set of interconnected stories, but I anticipate the series will probably run with one thread and not explore some of the other characters.

I enjoyed the book very much, I was thinking the best TV adaptation would be an anthology series of interconnected but largely stand-alone episodes kind of like that Amazon series “Tales From The Loop.”