There are spoilers for the Lovecraft Country Season 1 premiere . While Atticus, Letty, and George encounter many real monsters in Lovecraft Country , it's the entire town of Ardham that casts an ominous shadow in the first episode. Of course, Ardham isn't really a town; It's a continuation of Matt Ruff's 2016 novel, which the show is also based on. But it's also a clever reference to similar sinister locations in HP Lovecraft's original novel.
Atticus (nicknamed "Tick") first learned of Adham when he received an unusual letter from his father, Montrose, who called despite him being missing for two weeks. go home. In the letter, Montrose claimed to have discovered where his wife's family came from: a place called Adamu, where Tick had a "secret inheritance, a birthright" that had been kept from him.
The name Adama stands out because Tick first mispronounced Montrose's messy handwriting as "Arkham," a fictional city that appears repeatedly in HP Lovecraft's weird tales , and Tick guiltily enjoys reading these stories. In Lovecraft Country , Tick describes Arkham as "the home of Herbert West, the corpse-raiser, and the home of Miskatonic University, which sponsors the Mountains of Madness Fossil Hunting Expedition." (If Arkham sounds familiar, the name of Arkham Asylum in the Batman series comes from the same town.)
"Lovecraft used Salem as his base [Arkham], but it's not a real place," George tells Tick in the book. He then points out that Montrose actually wrote "Adem," and in the book, Adem is a small town with a population of about 250 people near the New Hampshire border.
When George noticed that Adham was in Devon, he mused, "Maybe this Adham is in Lovecraft Country after all." Their map featured a grim reaper and a sundial in the area, marking it as Being labeled a deeply racist county posed as much danger to black travelers as a wide-eyed shoggoth posed to Lovecraft's protagonists.
It turns out that the Grim Reaper is an apt image, as is the name Lovecraftian Country. As Tic, Letty and George travel to Ardham, they are accosted by a group of racist police chiefs who march them into the forest and claim that it is their "legal duty" to kill them after sunset. It's a gruesome police brutality scene as a group of evil creatures suddenly appear and kill all the vigilantes before being called away by a mysterious whistle. The three were stunned and stumbled to the Adam cabin, where a blond man opened the door and suspiciously welcomed Tick home.
Adem's quiet genius is that it serves as a meta-commentary on Lovecraft, a vicious racist who would never center his stories on a black protagonist. Tick's experience in Ardham is both an homage to and a subversion of Lovecraft's work. Like Arkham, Arkham has literal beasts roaming around. However, in the world of Lovecraft Country , sometimes the scariest monsters are those that hide behind human smiles.
