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From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, Paul La Farge, comes a riveting novel about secrets and scandals, psychiatry and pulp fiction, inspired by the lives of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle.
Marina Willett, M.D., has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina is a psychiatrist, and she doesn't believe them.
A tour-de-force of storytelling, ''The Night Ocean'' follows the lives of some extraordinary people: Lovecraft, the most influential American horror writer of the 20th century, whose stories continue to win new acolytes, even as his racist views provoke new critics; Barlow, a seminal scholar of Mexican culture who killed himself after being blackmailed for his homosexuality (and who collaborated with Lovecraft on the beautiful story "The Night Ocean"); his student, future Beat writer William S. Burroughs; and L.C. Spinks, a kindly Canadian appliance salesman and science-fiction fan - the only person who knows the origins of The Erotonomicon, purported to be the intimate diary of Lovecraft himself.
As a heartbroken Marina follows her missing husband's trail in an attempt to learn the truth, the novel moves across the decades and along the length of the continent, from a remote Ontario town, through New York and Florida to Mexico City. ''The Night Ocean'' is about love and deception - about the way that stories earn our trust, and betray it.
Author: Paul La Farge.
Paperback, 390 pages, Orig. Publ. 2017, This Edition Publ. April 2018
Reviews:
"Was H.P. Lovecraft, the great American horror writer, gay? That's the question at the start of this ingenious, provocative work of alternative history from La Farge ...Like Lovecraft's 'The Call of Cthulhu, ' the novel consists of several sub-narratives, ranging widely in time and place. But instead of a revelation about humanity's diminished place in an impersonal universe, La Farge delivers insights into the human need to believe in stories and the nature of literary fame, while consistently upsetting readers' expectations....He outdoes his predecessors with this crafty mix of love, sex, and lies."
- Publishers Weekly
"An electric exploration of horror, obsession, madness, and mystery. A novel that tunnels deeper into the thorny caverns of the human heart than most dare. To read ''The Night Ocean'' is to be plunged under a scary smart, morally labyrinthine, and wickedly funny spell. Paul La Farge is one of the most exciting writers working today."
- Laura van den Berg, author of ''Find Me''
"A beauty of a tale...A book full of pleasures...Dashing, playful and cleverly imagined, ''The Night Ocean'' emerges as an inexhaustible shaggy monster, part literary parody, part case study of the slipperiness of narrative and the seduction of a good story." - D. T. Max, The New York Times Book Review