From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, 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 …
From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor, 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.
I really wanted to like this more. It had an intriguing premise and there were moments when I was caught up in the puzzle of it, but it was uneven. There were lots of moments that I felt like I was reading Wikipedia pages for the different associates of HP Lovecraft. Ultimately, the plot wasn’t as twisty as I wanted it to be and the ending fell flat for me.
This is a book where my opinion of it has changed the longer I've been away from it. It's a strange book, and honestly its structure was nearly its undoing for me.
The majority of the book is conducted in a way where the narrator is twice removed from the retelling of events, and when Marina does make an appearance, it's a single line of dialogue every 50 pages or so. This is contrary to the hook of the book, which promises her mission to get the truth of her husband's disappearance and apparent suicide, but her perspective doesn't resurface until the very end of the book, when she (finally) takes center stage, which means her own despair lacks punch.
Had I written this right after finishing, I probably would have given this two stars, because it's own structure and scholarly conceit nearly sabotages the whole book. But I'm glad …
This is a book where my opinion of it has changed the longer I've been away from it. It's a strange book, and honestly its structure was nearly its undoing for me.
The majority of the book is conducted in a way where the narrator is twice removed from the retelling of events, and when Marina does make an appearance, it's a single line of dialogue every 50 pages or so. This is contrary to the hook of the book, which promises her mission to get the truth of her husband's disappearance and apparent suicide, but her perspective doesn't resurface until the very end of the book, when she (finally) takes center stage, which means her own despair lacks punch.
Had I written this right after finishing, I probably would have given this two stars, because it's own structure and scholarly conceit nearly sabotages the whole book. But I'm glad I waited, because it's allowed the shape of the story to settle into my mind, like a slow developing photo.
There's lots to like about the book. There are fun twists and turns as it plays with alternative interpretations of Lovecraft as a person in history. On one hand presenting him as a repressed and tortured soul, and another as a heartless racist. The same dichotomy is played it in different fashions with each of the other primary characters, LC Spinks and her husband himself. This is the point of the book, and what has ultimately swayed my opinion on it. Ultimately, this book is about the impossible search for truth.
Marina is desperately looking for revelation on what happened to her husband. She wants to understand his actions, even if it means she must follow his own obsessions to do so. She is forced to chase research that leads her several unreliable narrators deep. The motivations of their lies are not made clear, and perhaps the author's suggestion is that the motivation is meaningless, even thoughtless, much as the jellyfish that stings Marina at the end of the book.
The implication is that to get to the truth is impossible. More specifically, to get to the truth of a person is impossible. We see glimpses, quick reflections shining off of a facet of one's personality, but we interpret it according to our own desires, and either their deception, or our own willful ignorance conceals the entirety of the individual. You don't ever see the whole, and perhaps that's for the best. For, if you look closer, the book may even be suggesting that there is no truth of consequence, and your search through those black waters will at best get you stung, and at worst you will drown, only to become lost in the dark.
And that, that, is something worth thinking on, and earns the book its extra star.
