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Title: The Night Ocean
Author: Paul La Farge
Narrator: Elisabeth Rodgers
Format: Unabridged
Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
Language: English
Release date: 03-07-17
Publisher: Recorded Books
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 58 votes
Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
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, MD, 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.
Members Reviews:
Dead Cthulhu Still Lies Asleep
For a novel claiming to be about Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos there's scarcely little information about this author or his work. There is the standard Lovecraft bio in the beginning, but this is a missing persons story that gets side tracked by focusing on authors associated with the rise of pulp horror and who were tangentially connected with Lovecraft. Informative as this book might be about the doings of these writers, in the end all we have are fictionalized renditions of their thoughts and interactions. There is precious little insight as to how they invented their worlds. There are a couple of plot twists , but don't expect Cthulhu and his minions to make an appearance.
Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
A book that tries, mostly unsuccessfully, to layer together several stories and "books within books." It's a frustrating read, compounded by the realization at the end that it could have been good.
The first stumble is the worst, making for an awful setup: The two main characters are barely named and not established at all before we inexplicably jump into a very long excerpt of an old book. The result is that you don't know or care about the two main characters and you don't understand why there's an interminable digression into this "other text." Yet that other text and how the two main characters respond to it are what the whole plot hinges on.
Later, those characters are suitably drawn in, but only after that bungled start.
