Spoiler warning: Lovecraft Country airs in the UK on Mondays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic and is available to watch on demand now. Hello and welcome to your new favourite blog for your new favourite TV show. We, who will meet here weekly to talk Lovecraft Country, are a disparate bunch. Our members include recovering Buffy addicts, weird fiction nerds, Black Lives Matter activists enjoying some downtime and everyo who is still thinking about that tea-stirring scene in Get Out, two years after they left the cinema. What unites us is the sense that this new fantasy-sci-fi-horror-drama from HBO is the kind of show we could really get into. When did you first realise? For me, it was right after our man Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Jonathan Majors) explains his take on pulp fiction to a fellow passenger from the “coloured section” of the bus: “Stories are like people,” he says. “Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You just try and cherish them, overlook their flaws.” This sets out the ambitious scope of what the showrunner, Misha Green – with backing from big-name executive producers Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams – is trying to achieve here. This is an all-out monster-fighting, thrill-seeking adventure story, but its setting in the Jim Crow-era US – and its invocation of the work of a notoriously racist author, HP Lovecraft – means it can’t help but get deep in the weeds of racism, too. All this is seen through the appreciative but analytical eye of a true genre nerd. Like I said: my kinda show. This is a big task and luckily Tic seems to be bringing together a Scooby Gang of sorts (the Buffy comparisons are irresistible) to search for his missing father, Montrose. His first recruit is Uncle George (Courtney B Vance), a travel agent and writer of Green Book-style guides for African Americans hoping to make a long-distance journey without being attacked by marauding racists. (Yes, these guidebooks were a real historical necessity and, no, the 2018 Academy award-winning film does not do their story justice.) At George’s office, Tic produces a letter he received from Montrose. “The place he wants me to go with him? It’s in Lovecraft Country. The letter says Mum’s ancestors are from Ardham, Massachusetts.” If you are not much of a pulp fiction fan, never fear. Both Tic and Uncle George know their Lovecraft and it is helpfully pointed out that Ardham, otherwise known as “Arkham”, is the fictional town Lovecraft used as a setting for several of his stories. Fictional or not, it is the only lead they have, so they prepare to take a trip into Lovecraft Country. Along for the ride is Letitia “Leti” Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), a childhood friend of Tic’s, whom we later discover was “the only female member of the South Side Futurist Science Fiction Club”. (So she is also a nerd who has had a glow-up. The best people always are, I find.) Is it hot in Chicago? Or are Tic and Leti just really hot for each other? Both, actually. They have also both recently returned to town, after a mysterious period of absence, to mixed reception from their families. Leti is reunited with her older sister Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) at a street party and their sibling rivalry plays out on stage when Letitia gatecrashes Ruby’s performance of Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. (Bonus points to Mosaku for managing to make even her hip-shimmy look sourly disapproving). It is notable – but not noted in the show – that Leti is much lighter-skinned than her sister and brother. Skin, hair and eye colouring can vary among siblings – and it is also true that casting directors do not always bother to create a plausible likeness within on-screen families. But for a show as conscientiously detailed as this to overlook such a thing? Within a storyline that is closely concerned with “hidden bloodlines”? That seems unlikely and, to me, suggests some kind of intentional hint at a future plot twist. Bookmark that one for later. So Tic, George and Leti set off and the contemporary hip-hop gives way to James Baldwin’s 1965 debate speech at the University of Cambridge’s Union hall. “Is the American dream at the expense of the American negro?” Baldwin intones, as we see Tic, George and Letitia travelling through the midwest, mocked at a gas station by teenagers doing monkey calls, passing racist slurs scrawled on to road signs. “The Mississippi or Alabama sheriff, who really does believe, when he’s facing a negro boy or girl, that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity …” It is a powerful juxtaposition; if you did not know you were watching landmark television before, you know it now. You also know this is unlikely to be a leisurely drive and, sure enough, they are soon in a thrillingly slow car chase in which Letitia grabs the wheel (“My name’s not ‘girl’, it’s Letitia fucking Lewis!”) and getting lost in the woods, only to be found by a sinister-looking local sheriff. The episode then rounds out with an excellent “cabin in the woods” gore-fest and monster reveal, in which nerds-till-the-end Tic and George get to show off their genre knowledge as a means of escaping the danger. Of course, Tic knows what the Lovecraftian shoggoth monster looks like! Of course George can quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula! This is Lovecraft Country also showing off what it can do. It works. We are now ravenous for more, like a shoggoth who has has eaten a single racist cop since sun up. Notes and observations Misha Green’s first series, the “escaped slave heist thriller” Underground, was unfairly cancelled after two seasons, but is available to watch on Amazon Prime. Recognise The Good Fight’s Erica Tazel as Tic’s mum in those two briefly glimpsed family snaps? She is too quality an actress to cast just for the sake of a few sepia-tinged prop photos, so expect Tic’s ma – or perhaps her ghost? – to turn up later in the series. That dive bar that Tic ducks into is presumably named for Denmark Vesey, the African American leader executed in 1822, after being accused of planning a major slave revolt. That is Wunmi Mosaku’s real voice you are hearing singing R&B. Our Wunmi got hers during 11 years with the Manchester Girls Choir, while growing up in Chorlton. Reading list A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs is the book Tic is reading when he falls asleep on the Florida-Illinois bus. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is the book Tic finds in his father’s apartment. The Outsider and Others by Lovecraft, first published in 1939, is the book that Tic picks up in George’s office. James Baldwin debating William F Buckley at the Cambridge Union is available in full on YouTube. Quote of the week “You think that you can forget the past; you can’t. The past is a living thing, you own it, owe it.” This line from Montrose’s letter feels significant …