The Night Ocean Hardcover – March 7, 2017

Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean (2017) may be the most unusual novel to ever involve a dead author. In this case, the author is H. P. Lovecraft, arguably America’s greatest teller of weird tales after Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937), having very little popular or financial success during his lifetime writing macabre stories and one full-length novel which were published in “pulp” magazines of the mid-1920s, assured his place in literary history with fanciful stories often of cosmic horror. His writing is known for a verbose literary style and arcane language as well as his adjective-filled yet incredibly non-specific descriptions. Lovecraft’s creation of “the Great Old Ones,” hideous creatures, gods if you will, who once ruled the earth and the seas who patiently await the opportunity to re-enter our universe, destroy mankind, and rule again have inspired countless writers to this day to add to the “mythos” Lovecraft created. Foremost among the repulsive beings is Cthulhu, a gigantic, tentacled monstrosity always attempting to seduce humans into doing his bidding to allow his return.Although Lovecraft’s fiction, essays, and numerous letters have survived and have often been re-printed, the author himself has long remained a bit of a mystery. That’s where Paul La Farge and The Night Ocean enter the scene.The Night Ocean begins with some fascinating premises. What was H. P. Lovecraft like as a human being? It is pretty well known from his stories, letters, and from personal accounts of those who knew him that the man was a racist, a misogynist, and an anti-Semite. He also lived a rather reclusive life. There have been rumors he might have been gay or asexual. Many of his close friends were gay (poets Samuel Loveman and Hart Crane foremost among them) and his only marriage, to Sonia Green, lasted for all practical purposes less than a year. Adding to the mystery of Lovecraft’s personal life is R. H. Barlow—a young fan with whom Lovecraft corresponded near the end of his life and who produced a number of mimeographed fan magazines devoted to Lovecraft. Lovecraft left his home in Providence (something he seldom did) and spent long periods of time visiting Barlow in Florida on a couple of occasions. No one knows what occupied the older Lovecraft, then in his forties, and Barlow, an openly gay sixteen-year-old during those visits. Lovecraft, however, named Barlow his literary executor upon the author’s death at age forty-six (due to cancer)—an action which would be contentious and lead to numerous complications with writer August Derleth eventually stepping in and creating Arkham Press to release Lovecraft’s works in distinguished volumes along with many of the works of other, early writers who carried on Lovecraft’s literary heritage.So—La Farge’s novel contends, what if there was an actual diary penned by Lovecraft about his relationship with Barlow? What if a journalist, Charlie Willett, a man “good at… immersing himself in obscure and beautiful fact,” becomes obsessed with Lovecraft’s private and social life and discovering new truths? What if Willett’s fixation and/or what he discovers results in him having a mental breakdown, lands him in a sanitarium from which he walks away, and he texts his wife a photograph of the sea at night—perhaps the last thing he sees before walking into the water and committing suicide? What if his body is never found and his wife, Marina, a psychotherapist working with “rape survivors, survivors of incest…” dealing with things “more terrible than anything in Lovecraft,” refuses to believe her husband is dead and decides to follow her husband’s footsteps to discover not only the truth about her husband’s fate, but of what he discovered about Lovecraft and Barlow? From this point forward, very early in the novel, The Night Ocean becomes a very complex, complicated novel.When writers choose to fictionalize real-life persons, especially famous authors, they venture onto thin ice. Should they stray too far away from the author’s real personality and plausible events, the entire work loses its value (a perfect example of this is Poe Must Die by Marc Olden; 1978). Capturing the true spirit of a famous writer in a fictional work can also be quite captivating (to continue to use the example of Poe, Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow, 2006, is excellent). For the most part, H. P. Lovecraft is “off stage” in The Night Ocean, seen mainly through letters and documents and the (not always unbiased) recollections of people who knew Lovecraft. However, La Farge includes in his novel a multitude of real-life people, both living and dead, who knew, studied, or have written works in the vein of Lovecraft. They include, among others, August Derelth, Donald Wandrei, Frederick Pohl, Judith Meredith, Doris Baumgardt, Clark Ashton Smith, Isaac Asimov (the portrait of whom is quite cutting and frequently hilarious), Ursula K. LeGuinn, and today’s leading (although to some controversial) expert on all-things Lovecraftian, S. T. Joshi. In his Acknowledgements, La Farge references relatives of many of the deceased individuals with whom he consulted in creating the novel.The complexity of The Night Ocean stems from the book’s varying narrators and points of view. Real events take place alongside fictional ones. Ever changing, there are also deceptions and lies which are too numerous to keep track. Some of the characters in The Night Ocean are more slippery and slimy than the worst Lovecraftian horror lurking under the surface of the sea. In real life R. H. Barlow “reinvented” himself a number of times after Lovecraft’s death and was “an American author, avant-garde poet, anthropologist and historian of early Mexico, and expert in the Nahuatl language” (Wikipedia) and teacher in Mexico before committing suicide to avoid being outed as gay. The fictional Barlow is even more inventive and elusive person.There are hoaxes and scandals galore in the novel as well as obvious tips of the hat to Lovecraft’s work. His short novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (written in 1927 but published posthumously), is referenced in a variety of ways throughout the novel as is Lovecraft’s love of including references to old, forgotten, and forbidden texts such as the Necronomicon (a book some fans have thought over the ages exists or was written by Lovecraft—neither of which is true—so powerful is Lovecraft’s image and reoccurring use of the book in his stories). La Farge’s inclusion in his novel of a secret manuscript entitled The Erotonomicon written by Lovecraft detailing the relationship the author had with Barlow, complete with code words based upon some of the monsters Lovecraft created to stand for assorted sex acts, is both tantalizing and entertaining as well as one of the many of the incongruities which influence events in the novel.None of Lovecraft’s monsters appear in The Night Ocean (unlike in Victor LaValle’s recent outstanding novella, The Ballad of Black Tom; 2016), but as one character in The Night Ocean states, “America is truly Lovecraft’s country: fearful because it cannot love.”At the beginning of The Night Ocean La Farge quotes from Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: “I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe” and at one point a character in the novel refers to the account he is about to tell Marina Willett “a horror story.” Both are good things for the reader of The Night Ocean to keep in mind as they find their head spinning among all the twists and turns of both the novel and its characters. As is affirmed in the novel, “People are full of inconsistencies and contradictions. It’s no wonder history is so hard to piece together.”Some readers will find it is somewhat unfortunate to follow La Farge through his labyrinth of a novel to reach the end of the book only to discover one more piece of ambiguity. It may be fitting of the novel’s tone, its many ruses and content, but for some it may also be enough to risk the possible fate of Charles Willett—and go mad. The Night Ocean is one of five titles to be nominated, one of which will win the annual Shirley Jackson Award in the category of novels to be awarded on July 15, 2018. Should The Night Ocean win, it might just be the rip in the cosmos Cthulhu has been awaiting to re-enter the world.

I hate three star reviews, the critic's version of a “meh.” When you pour your heart and soul into writing a book, you hope to inspire something. Preferably joy, horror, love, etc., depending on the genre. If not that, loathing works. A one star review means someone was passionate about your book. I’m as likely to buy a novel on the basis of a well-written one star review as I am a similarly passionate five star review. But three stars? Meh.As much as I hate to say it, The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge falls squarely in that three star range for me. It shouldn’t have been this way.The Night Ocean is part of the new hotness that is re-imagining or re-purposing Lovecraft with an ironic twist that would have horrified the late master of the unseen forces that bend men’s fates. The Ballad of Black Tom, which I loved, does this with racism. Lovecraft Country, currently on my reading list, does the same. The Night Ocean tackles the dubious subject of Lovecraft’s sexuality. This, I was not expecting. I was also skeptical, and remain so, that this is a subject that’s all that interesting. We know that Lovecraft was married. His wife Sonia Greene called him “an adequately excellent lover.” (Talk about a three star review). But other than that, Lovecraft is thought of as decidedly a-sexual, too isolated from humanity to enjoy love or its attendant physical pursuits.The Night Ocean posits that Lovecraft may have been gay and may have had an illicit affair with a young protege, Robert Barlow, who authored a short story of the same name as our novel. The husband of our protagonist sets off to discover the truth, and in doing so gets himself tangled in a story of mystery and deceit that takes the entire novel to unravel.Now you may be asking yourself, where’s the horror? And that would be precisely the problem. I stumbled upon The Night Ocean while reading an article entitled “8 Lovecraftian Tales for Those Who Don’t Want to Read Lovecraft which I was pleasantly surprised to see included That Which Should Not Be. Since the article’s author clearly has good taste, I decided to pick up some of the other books on the list as well. The Night Ocean was one of them.The Night Ocean starts off well, promising an almost House of Leaves–style story within a story, where nothing is ever quite what it seems and the author may not be completely reliable. A couple biographies later and the book was over, without anything all that Lovecraftian ever having happened.I think it was my expectations that ruined it for me. The book is well written, with all the literary fiction quality one would expect from a book stamped with the “A novel” disclaimer. But it’s not horror. Not at all. So for me, it was just…meh.3 Stars

Starts with a good idea then falls into stupidity.

Lo que al comienzo parece ser una típica narración lovecraftniana con elementos sobrenaturales al margen, poco a poco se convierte en una historia de misterio con más giros inesperados de la trama de los que pensé que podría soportar. Más o menos a mitad del libro no sabes cuál es cielo y cuál es la tierra, qué es verdad, qué es mentira o ni siquiera quién es el protagonista.Recomendado para aquellos que piensan que ya nada los puede sorprender.

Probably wouldn’t have bothered carrying on if lockdown wasn’t in place. The story is just massive chunks of not particularly interesting exposition which ultimately has no pay off. Kept waiting for it to get better, but it didn’t