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Executive producer Jordan Peele’s hit HBO series Lovecraft Country is based on the book of the same name by author Matt Ruff. The show and the book explore the familiar creatures from H.P. Lovecraft’s pulp stories while using Black history, Black characters, and Black culture to tell a unique story. Lovecraft Country Radio is the official companion podcast hosted by Ashley C. Ford and series writer Shannon Houston. After each episode of the HBO series, Ford and Houston discuss the themes and concepts relevant to the episode. These concepts include magic as a tool for white supremacy, shifting reality, and performative humanity. The concept that resonated strongly was the absurdity of racism because the idea, practice, and celebration of racism are truly absurd.
“There’s another word for racism and it’s absurdity.”
Shannon Houston, Episode 1: “Sundown,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020)
Welcome To Lovecraft Country Radio
The first episode of Lovecraft Country Radio is a primer ahead of the series premiere. We’re introduced to co-hosts Ashley C. Ford and Shannon Houston. Ashley C. Ford is a writer and podcast host of The Chronicles of Now as well as others. Shannon Houston, a film and TV critic for PASTE Magazine, is one of the writers on Lovecraft Country and offers a glimpse into her experience in the writers’ room.
The purpose of Lovecraft Country Radio isn’t to explain every aspect of the show. The hosts don’t set out to tell the audience how to feel about the content. The television series leaves us with questions that can’t always be answered by outside sources. Ford and Houston share both personal and professional insights that give the listeners more to think about and, hopefully, start discussions on these topics in their own lives.
At the end of each episode, the hosts and guests, such as actor Jamie Chung, podcast host Eric Eddings, and showrunner Misha Green, give recommendations for books, essays, movies, and music. Some of the suggestions relate directly to that episode’s themes and plot points. Some are more loosely connected and are meant just for fun, such as the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and The Goonies.
Understanding The World Of Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft is regarded as one of the great American writers in history. He’s considered to be the father of the subgenre “weird fiction.”(( Daniel José Older, “One Hundred Years of Weird Horror,” BuzzFeed (2014) )) Lovecraft was inspired by the writings of Edgar Allen Poe as well as the scientific journals of the late 1800s into the mid-1920s. The author was also a known white supremacist.
In the first episode of the podcast, Houston recites H.P. Lovecraft’s poem entitled On the Creation of Niggers. The title alone is shocking, but the writing speaks volumes about his beliefs. In this poem, Lovecraft puts forward the idea that Black people were created secondary to the white race. He refers to them as “beasts for lesser parts” who were “too remote from humankind.” The last two lines read,
“A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.”
H.P. Lovecraft, On the Creation of Niggers (1912)
Lovecraft spent most of his life as a recluse, especially when he moved from his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, to the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. By closing himself off from the world, particularly the melting pot of New York, his racism and antisemitism spiraled into a full-on phobia. Xenophobia heavily influenced his work. The common theme in Lovecraftian horror is fear of otherness or outsiders.
In Conversation With Racism
Lovecraft Country Radio presents new ideas in each episode as well as revisits previous concepts, adding to them and expanding on their own personal experiences. There are specific instances of overt racism in “Sundown,” “Holy Ghost,” and “Strange Case.” In these episodes, we see the Jim Crow-era Black experience when it comes to where Black people are allowed to travel, live, and work.
The Perils Of Traveling
In the series premiere episode, “Sundown,” we meet Atticus “Tic” Freeman, a young soldier leaving the segregated South to return to his home in Chicago. The episode opens with a black and white dream sequence where Tic is down in the trenches of the Korean War as he fights and kills his way to the top. The dream shifts into color. It becomes a truly Lovecraftian scene complete with UFOs, an alien princess, and Jackie Robinson taking on Cthulhu.
This Part of the Bus for the Colored Race
Tic is startled awake as the bus hits a bump on the road. The only other Black person on the bus sits a couple of seats ahead of him. She reassures, “Just going over a bridge named after some dead slave owner.” Hanging his arm out of the window, he flips off the “Welcome to Kentucky” sign as they pass. “Good riddance to old Jim Crow,” he says. The two exchange smiles, but their amusement is short lived. The bus blows a tire, and now they’re stranded.
Tic reads A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs while he sits on the side of the road next to the broken-down bus. A truck pulls up, and the white passengers start loading in. One look from the white truck driver, and Tic knows he’s not getting a ride. He walks over to the Black passenger and offers to carry her bags.
It’s not said exactly how long and how far the two have to walk until they reach a bus station or a ride of some kind. But the fact that they are discarded and unimportant to anyone on the bus as well as the person who picks up everyone else is absurd. Seeing Atticus’ face when he accepts that he’s not getting a ride with the others is heartbreaking. But he keeps his head up, ensures that the Black woman won’t have to carry her luggage, and pushes on. This is our hero.
Safe Spaces
Tic arrives at his Uncle George’s apartment, greeted by George, his cousin Dee, and Aunt Hippolyta. Below the apartment is George and Hippolyta’s business. The couple research, write and publish The Safe Negro Travel Guidebook. George travels to different parts of the country to find safe spaces for Black people to visit, such as restaurants and hotels. This resource is invaluable for the community and allows Black people to feel more protected as they explore America.
As Shannon Houston points out in episode one of Lovecraft Country Radio, Black people could have accepted these limitations and stayed home. Instead, people like the Freeman’s made it possible to travel even though it meant taking extra precautions. There’s always some level of risk when anyone travels — car accidents, violent encounters with strangers, getting lost. However, traveling for Black people was potentially deadly.
“So, what does that mean, when in my land, I can’t travel from one place to another without my life being endangered just for existing? For having the audacity to exist.”
Ashley C. Ford, Episode 1: “Sundown,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020)
The night before they hit the road, there’s a block party with live music, dancing, and children playing in the streets. There’s a sense of joy and safety in this community. This is in stark contrast to their journey ahead. Once they leave Chicago and start traveling East through sundown towns, we gradually see the danger all around them.
Confrontation At The Gas Station
The trio makes a stop at a gas station. Atticus and Leti are talking and laughing when a white boy at the gas station starts imitating a monkey, making fun of Atticus for eating a banana. Tic throws the banana at the guy, and Leti pulls him away before it can progress any further. That could have easily gotten him killed. The two were minding their business when, as Shannon Houston says,
“a white person very desperately needs to remind you that you’re Black and that they have a problem with it.”
Shannon Houston, Episode 1: “Sundown,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020)
Part of the horror is that they’re surrounded by people who want them dead. In the face of hatred, they have to smile, be polite, or do nothing and walk away. They are forced to accept the way they’re treated. If they fight back, they are as good as dead.
Trouble In Simmonsville
As Leti and George sing along to a B.B. King song on the radio, Tic notices three white firefighters in front of the firehouse glaring as they drive by. Even their German Shepherd barks at them and pulls on the chain. This image is reminiscent of police dogs attacking Black people in the past.
George has Lydia’s marked in the guidebook as a safe place for Black travelers to dine in Simmonsville. It’s not a Black-owned establishment, but the white owner was known to serve Black visitors. When they arrive, the sign has been changed, the bricks painted over, and the former owner nowhere to be seen. The diner is under new management: the Simmonsville fire department.
When Leti’s on her way to the ladies’ room, she overhears the clearly terrified waiter on the phone telling someone about their arrival, reassuring the person on the other end that he did not serve them. Leti runs back into the dining area, yelling that they need to leave right now. They quickly hop in the car and speed away as a truck with three white firemen goes after them. One of the men has a shotgun and stands in the bed of the truck, firing shots as they ride up behind them.
Leti drives with George in the passenger seat while Tic sits in the back seat and fires at the men in the truck. A silver Bentley appears and somehow causes the truck to flip, launching the men from the vehicle and ultimately killing them. A mysterious white woman exits the undamaged car and locks eyes with Atticus. Her character is officially introduced in the second episode, “Whitey’s on the Moon,” and the group learns that she possesses magic.
Navigating Absurdity With The Sheriff
After driving in circles for hours with no sign of Ardham, Tic is visibly frustrated and makes George pull over. Tic gets out to look around, but Leti follows. She tries to calm him down and assure him that they’re going to find his father. There’s a noise in the woods that startles them. Tic quips that it could be a shoggoth, one of the creatures from a Lovecraft novel. Leti and Tic laugh it off, but their smiles falter when a police car parks behind their vehicle and the white sheriff approaches them.
The sheriff mainly addresses George, likely since he was in the driver’s seat. George has years of experience de-escalating situations with police, and it shows. He answers the sheriff’s question respectfully and avoids any hint of aggression. All of his responses are “yes, sir” or “no, sir.” While Tic knows this is the safest way to handle this encounter, he can’t hide his anger and frustration. The fear and humiliation of Tic being forced to “nicely” ask the sheriff to make a U-turn is almost unbearable to watch. They are told that they have seven minutes until sundown. If they speed, he will pull them over. This scene is incredibly tense. The sheriff follows them to the county line, literally pushing them with his car.
Even with everything working against them, the trio makes it over the county line just in time. As soon as they drive over into the next county, they are blocked by several police cars and officers aiming shotguns at them. The sheriff gave them these ridiculous parameters, creating an unnecessarily tense situation; our heroes prevail. Though, it doesn’t actually matter. Ford talks about the use of apathy as a form of oppression.
“You know how people control you? It’s not by making you hate yourself. It’s by making you not care what happens to you because you feel like you don’t have any control over it either.”
Ashley C. Ford, Episode 1: “Sundown,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020)
Who Are The Real Monsters?
The group of officers takes Tic, Leti, and George into the woods at gun point. They taunt them with slurs and talk about their impending deaths as if their lives are a joke to them. This is a sundown county, and it’s within the officers’ rights, or anyone, to kill Black people after the sun sets in a particular area.
Sheriff Hunt’s interrogation in the woods is cut short when a giant creature attacks a few of his men. Atticus and Leti take off running along with Hunt and one of his deputies. They all find an empty cabin to take shelter in (George eventually finds them), but the officers don’t let this unbelievable attack get in the way of their racism. Shannon Houston equates this to today’s police brutality:
“We’re in the middle of a pandemic, we’re facing a monster like we’ve never faced before and motherf*ckers are out here still being racist?”
Shannon Houston, Episode 1: “Sundown,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020)
Hunt and his deputy are still barking orders laced with racist slurs at the group, trying to maintain control over the situation. Despite having just seen giant monsters covered in eyeballs ripping apart and eating his officers, the sheriff yells, “There’s no such thing as monsters!” Not long after this declaration of denial, the sheriff begins coughing and twitching. George notices his behavior and realizes that the sheriff was bitten by one of the monsters.
Ironically, the sheriff becomes a shoggoth himself. Again, too focused on dehumanizing the Black people before him, the deputy refuses to kill the sheriff-turned-monster, which leads to his death. The co-hosts of Lovecraft Country Radio point out that the monsters make more sense than the racist officers. They are actually rescued by the shoggoths in the woods. The police would’ve killed them. In this case, monsters saved the day.
Pioneering Is Dangerous
In the third episode of the series titled “Holy Ghost,” Leti comes into some money (of mysterious origin). She uses that money to buy a house on the northside of the city in an all-white neighborhood. She intends to run a boarding house for Black people in need of affordable housing. However, at first, it’s just her artist friends that move in.
“The very act of buying a home in this neighborhood and staking out claim to a space that has said you’re not welcome there is f*cking revolutionary.”
Shannon Houston, Episode 3: “Holy Ghost,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020)
As Leti and her new housemates are moving in, they hear multiple car horns outside. They come out to see three cars parked in front of the house, bricks tied to the steering wheels on the horns, and their white neighbors leaning against the cars, clearly very proud of themselves. Two cops even drive by to show that they don’t see anything wrong here.
The blaring horns are ridiculous for several reasons. These men would have to leave their cars there at all times, bricks placed on the horns, likely damaging the vehicles somehow. This also disturbs the entire neighborhood, not just the people they don’t like, so they’re really hurting their own community. The energy it takes to go through this process of cruelty is significant. Ford also notes how professional the “We Are a White Community. Undesirables Must Go” signs look, meaning they spent time and money on this act of hatred.
A few days later, Leti discovers the radiator is broken. Tic recognizes this tactic of excessive heat as one of the forms of torture used in the war, along with relentless noise. He suggests the neighbors could be veterans. The neighbors’ actions come from more than just anger. They are rooted in racism.
Leti throws a party, and nearly the entire South Side is in attendance. Like the block party in episode one, we feel safe in this community. Everyone is dancing, drinking, and laughing, enjoying this celebration of pioneering and minding their business. Everything comes to a halt when they see the flames of a giant cross on the front lawn. The guests are shocked and scared, but Leti is furious and rightfully so. She grabs a baseball bat, seething with anger as she walks outside, and begins busting the headlights and windows of the cars, knocking the bricks off of the horns. Atticus and three other men stand there with shotguns while Leti is, as Ashley C. Ford says, “in the midst of her reasonable rage.” (( Ashley C. Ford, Episode 3: “Holy Ghost,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020) ))
Ruby, Interrupted
The fifth episode, “Strange Case,” is centered on Ruby Baptiste, Leti’s older sister. In the previous episode, she goes home with William, a white man who intends to change her life. He doesn’t tell her exactly how he is going to change her life, though. The next day, she wakes up alone in his bed. She examines her white hands in the sunlight peeking through the drapes. Ruby stumbles out of bed in this new body, the body of a white woman.
This new Ruby finds her way back to the South Side. In her confused state, she accidentally collides with a young Black boy on the sidewalk. At that moment, a police cruiser pulls up. The two white officers immediately attack the boy asking what he did to her, throwing him against the police car and then to the ground. Ruby stops the officer before he beats the boy with his baton and tells him that the boy was trying to help her. One of the cops says, “There’s no need to protect this animal, ma’am.” The Black pedestrians and business owners stand around, watching in almost a passive disgust. To them, the only thing unusual about this is the white woman stumbling around in a silk robe and fuzzy slippers.
The officers take Ruby back to William’s residence. He claimed that she was his wife, and she wandered off in one of her “fits” requiring medication. They ignore her when she says that William is not her husband and did something to her. In a white woman’s skin, she’s treated with care and caution, but she was still a woman in 1955. This woman is clearly mentally ill to the officers and needs to be in her husband’s care. William carries “Ruby” into the house and carefully places her on the living room floor. The transformation back into herself is gruesome.
The sounds of her bones cracking and skin ripping, combined with her screams, make the scene painful watch. William says this is more of a metamorphosis. When Ruby wakes up back in her body, she tells William that it felt like being “unmade.” Ruby is rightfully scared of the magic she’s experienced, but there’s a part of her that trusts William. He presents her with a vile of the red potion and leaves her to make the choice for herself. This time she willingly takes the potion and transforms back into “white Ruby.” She spends the day strolling around the north side at her leisure. In this new body,
“I don’t know what’s more difficult: being colored or being a woman. Most days I am happy to be both but the world keeps interrupting and I am sick of being interrupted.”
Ruby, Episode 5: “Strange Case,” Lovecraft Country (2020)
After the freeing experience as a white woman, Ruby decides to use this potion again to interview for her dream job, naming herself Hillary Davenport. Her resume is the same as before, but as a white woman, she immediately gets the job of assistant manager. The absurdity here is that despite applying to Marshall Field’s in the past, with an impressive resume and strong work ethic, Ruby never got the job because the store doesn’t hire women of color. However, the store recently lifted its “whites only” policy. They hired one Black woman named Tamara, which the manager says caused many employees to quit.
The Lovecraft Country Radio hosts each struggle with this idea of a Black woman transforming into a white woman. Shannon Houston revealed that the writer’s room spent a lot of time working on this episode’s complexities. She admits that she “hated the idea of a Black woman choosing to be white.”(( Shannon Houston, Episode 5: “Strange Case,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020) )) Houston didn’t want it to seem like Ruby wasn’t proud of her Blackness. She explains that Ruby takes the potion to get the job she wants.
Ashley C. Ford discusses what this episode meant to her. She agrees with Houston that Ruby isn’t trying to be somebody else for the fun of it. This potion is necessary for Ruby to simply obtain a job as well as the freedom of being left alone. Ford continues,
“When we start to learn about the ways that the world will attempt to hold us back, when we start to learn about all the places where, so far, we have not been allowed to go, or to reach because of our skin color, our gender, our non-gender, like whatever it is…so much of it is like just in our way.”
Ashley C. Ford, Episode 5: “Strange Case,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020)
The Importance Of Lovecraft Country Radio
In the primer episode, “Welcome to Lovecraft Radio,” Ashley C. Ford and Shannon Houston invite us to join them on this beautiful, terrifying journey in understanding Lovecraft Country. Listeners are given the tools to develop a deeper understanding of the material.
“We are going to make sure your viewing experience is extraordinary.”
Ashley C. Ford, Episode 1: “Sundown,” Lovecraft Country Radio (2020)