Sunday night saw HBO’s premier of the long anticipated series adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country.

I have not read the novel so my impressions of the series and the only ‘aired’ episode so far is driven entirely by the onscreen material.

Episode one centered on Atticus ‘Tic’ Freeman (Jonathan Majors) an army veteran recently discharged following the Korean War’s armistice as he travels home to Chicago because his father has gone missing. Uniting with his Father’s brother George (Courtney B. Vance), who travels researching his guide to safe travels for Black people in Jim Crow America, and childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), he travels to ‘Lovecraft country’, rural Massachusetts, following clues to his father’s disappearance and hints of an ancestral legacy.

Aside from a vivid dream sequence at the episode’s opening Lovecraft Countytakes its time revealing its cosmic horror nature instead rightly focusing on character, mood, and critically environment creating a believable and frightening world with terrors drawn from history as well as the imagination. Jonathan Majors is well cast as ‘Tic,’ the bookish young man with a love of pulp adventures now grown into a handsome muscular man but with those same doubts and self-image issues waiting just under the surface. Jurnee Smollett’s Letitia while seemingly a woman who appears primarily as a sensualist also possesses depths and intellect that in the first episode promise greater things for her character and Vance’s Uncle George brings a sense of wisdom and hard-earned experience to the trio.

The cinematography fills a night encounter rich saturated colors from blood red flares while daylight excursions have a washed out colorless and joyless oppression to them, reflecting well the dual nature of the story and the show, fantastical weird apparitions existing alongside with banal historical evil. The show’s soundtrack is a mix of period and modern music and that I found a little jarring but other viewers are less likely to have their suspension of disbelief bumped by the choices.

It is nigh on impossible to adequately judge a story by just 10 percent of its content other than to say that the characters and encounters are all laid out in a pleasing, engaging manner and if the entire series maintains this quality, we are in for one frightening ride.