Running the store is one Emily Lovecraft, who turns out to be the last living descendant of the fiction writer. She cares little for her descendant, and doesn't want a new boss, particularly one who knows nothing about the book business. After meeting her and her blue-blood boyfriend, Carter decides to share the bookstore with Lovecraft, leaving her in charge and returning to his business as a P.I. Strange things begin to happen, of course, as Carter begins suffering from hallucinations and fugue states, and an anonymous phone call ties him to the mysterious death of a man who seemingly drowns to death inside of a locked car.
Carter does what he does best, and starts investigating, and ends up hunting, and being hunted by a universally unpopular professor of Mathematics, who can seemingly manipulate the laws of probability to achieve the impossible. Then things get really strange, as Carter, with Lovecraft’s help, discovers a reclusive family that have been living on a piece of ocean-side property since before the arrival of Europeans in Rhode Island. Up to here things have been a bit off, but Mr. Howard puts the petal to the metal, and as befitting a book about Lovecraft, events get down-right eldritch, and the very nature of reality is suddenly up for grabs. To continue with a summery would be impossible without dropping dozens of spoilers, but Mr. Howard shows a real gift for mixing mind-bending concepts with taut plotting and down to earth prose and characterizations that manages to mix cosmic explorations with prosaic reality without stinting on either one. Such an approach could have easily failed, but Mr. Howard shows a real talent for using the juxtaposition to achieve new and startling effects. It’s an old trick by now, but Mr. Howard wa able to make me laugh at the characters dialogue one moment, and tear off the top of my head with his latest riff on the Cthulhu Mythos the next, without seeming to rely on formulaic tropes. A lot of people don’t think that humor and horror can exist side-by-side, but they are really just two sides of the same mask, and Mr. Howard plays both like a virtuoso.
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July 2020
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