Courtesy of Elizabeth Morris/HBO

In Lovecraft Country, dark fantasy met pulp fiction at the epicenter of racial storytelling. There was the horror of bloodthirsty gigantesque monsters working in tandem with the malevolence teeming across the 1950s landscape to deliver a seat-clenching tale of modern day demons. Structural racism, white supremacy, and police brutality to list a lofty few. Created and executive produced by Misha Green, the HBO show’s first season entranced an expansive audience that even eclipsed viewership records on the network’s streaming service. Now, the wondrous journey into terror, guided by Jim Crow chronicles, has come to an unsettling end as HBO has decided against its renewal.

“We will not be moving forward with a second season of Lovecraft Country,” HBO said in a statement to Deadline, who first reported the story. “We are grateful for the dedication and artistry of the gifted cast and crew, and to Misha Green, who crafted this groundbreaking series. And to the fans, thank you for joining us on this journey.” Based off Matt Ruff’s eponymous 2016 novel, the first season felt like an on-screen ingress into the historical foundation of our present-day sociopolitical climate sans the trauma porn. Upon its rapturous debut, New York Times perfectly dubbed the Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett starrer a “Nightmare on Jim Crow Street.”

The 10-episode first season we are introduced to the characters as varied threads of Black America’s cultural fabric. Atticus Freeman (Majors), Black Korean War Veteran whose temperament is contextualized as one of the many forgotten soldiers of the forgotten war, traverses the country in search for his missing father Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams). On his journey, he’s accompanied by his childhood friend Letitia (Smollett), a civil rights activist, and his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), the publisher of a “Green Book”-esque guide for Black travelers.

Each episode wades through the complexities of survival as the gore of literal monsters and figurative monsters (i.e. police officers in sundown towns and allies of the Ku Klux Klan) looms ahead. Ultimately, its a cathartic revelation of the eons-old horrors of segregation, institutional gaslighting, and hatred that still torments modern day life. While the first season was based on Ruff’s novel (and notably assisted by the executive production of horror-comedy virtuoso Jordan Peele), the second installment relied solely on Green (who lent her pen to all ten previous episodes). However, from the looks of the production bible, HBO had no reason to fret a tepid viewership on the second go-round.

According to Green’s Twitter posts, the season would have delved into a new world that supplanted the United States as the Sovereign States of America and was fittingly titled Lovecraft Country: Supremacy. Divvied into Hunger Games-like districts, the characters were bound to face off a zombie epidemic across the dystopian map. Now, we can only leave the apocalyptic events up to our imaginations.

topics: Lovecraft Country