With Amy Schumer’s brilliant, biting sketch-cum-stand-up-cum-interview show, the subject is largely sex -the series’ very title is a porn trope -a subject much, even too much, on the minds of people who make television. Still, both Ruff’s book and Green’s series function as much a critique as celebration the mere fact that the series’ heroes are all Black is in itself a riposte to the early 20th century author, spitting in his otherwise admired eye. Lovecraft, an influential writer of pulp fiction and weird tales, is well-known indeed, it’s a point the characters explicitly discuss. Loewen’s study “Sundown Towns,” as in “get out by.” The racism of H.P.
Matt Ruff, on whose 2016 novel the series is based - sometimes closely, sometimes loosely - was inspired in part by Pam Noles’ 2006 essay “Shame,” about the unbearable whiteness of sci-fi and the difficulties it presents to what she calls an “FoP,” as in, “Fan of Pigment,” and in its particulars by “The Negro Motorist Green-Book” and by James W. That Misha Green’s series “Lovecraft Country” has something to say about the ordinary horrors of racism as well as the cosmic ones of fantastic fiction is mixed into its foundation.
