Spoiler: The Lovecraft Country book is so much better than the show.
The book has the same characters I liked in the show, but with more scifi nerdery, more character development, more of a subtle creeping horror and less bloody-body-parts horror. There’s a constant, mundane threat in daily life under segregation, and it’s used to make all the dangers and supernatural horrors frightening and intense. Also, at the risk of a mild spoiler (I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to discover that a character can die in an HBO horror show?), there is a person who dies in the show who doesn’t die in the book. I can’t say any more without spoilers, but basically every scene that I wasn’t into didn’t happen in the book, and every relationship that I wanted to explore was developed in the book. I felt like I was reading my own Lovecraft Country fanfiction.
Full review is on my book blog.
