Lovecraft Country is a road trip novel about an African-American family facing supernatural (and other) horrors during the Jim Crow era, and will be an HBO series produced by Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams. The cast includes Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Jonathan Majors, Courtney B. Vance, Michael Kenneth Williams, and Elizabeth Debicki. Booklist says the author “vividly portrays racism as a horror worse than anything conceived by Lovecraft,” which sounds perfect for the director of Get Out and Us.
Motherless Brooklyn is a spin on the noir genre that won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. The movie adaptation is set for release November 1, and will star Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Leslie Mann. It will also be directed by Norton, who bought film rights soon after the book’s publication and will play Lionel Essrog, a private detective with Tourette’s syndrome out to solve his mentor’s murder. While the novel is set in contemporary Brooklyn, the movie will be set in 1954.
Whether you’re a proponent of read-the-book-before-the-movie or see-the-movie-first, you’ll want to get these onto your TBR pile.
