Carter & Lovecraft

Carter & Lovecraft is a perfectly solid and altogether competent novel. The plot kept my interest, it was easy to like the main characters. And yet none of these things me to believe the book was more than just decent.

The story showed a lot of potential early on, with some delightfully weird and mysterious events. Unfortunately, these elements weren't as interesting once they were explained (kind of explained?). There are some smart ideas and very creepy moments early on, but none of things I liked about the book were present as I reached the last page.

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The heirs of Lovecraft.

So, it seems that Lovecraft was not simply a writer with social anxiety issues; rather, he was writing a secret history of a secret world that his ancestor would have to unravel.

Dan Carter is a New York detective who found a serial child murder. The child murder was using the children for research into the true nature of the world. Because Carter's partner immediately killed himself after killing the child murderer, Carter took early retirement and went into the private investigation business. Not long, thereafter, Carter mysteriously finds himself as the owner of a bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island, where Emily Lovecraft - HP's granddaughter - works.

The mystery of the child killer continues to haunt Carter as he is brought into a new set of mysteries, beginning with the murder of a college professor who is improbably drowned in his car while it is parked at the college parking lot. Carter's investigations lead him to an obnoxious mathematician and an inbred community located at Waite's Bill and, ultimately, to a threat to our reality.

The characters of Carter and Lovecraft are well-drawn. Over the course of the book, they develop as a team, each contributing their strength and insights to the resolution of the mystery. Clearly, we have the beginning of a continuing team-up.

The reader ought to suspect that another book is in the works from the conclusion, which seems to suggest that the original world that H.P. Lovecraft knew before he mystically fixed the world into a pattern of science and reason.

This is a thoroughly contemporary book. Emily Lovecraft is African-American, notwithstanding H.P.'s notorious racism. Carter is constantly dropping analogies to films, and there are several obligatory urban elite shots at the NRA. Howard also nicely works in classic Lovecraftian elements, such as the hidden cultists and half-human/half-inhuman mixed breeds.

The book is fun and inventive. The piece that stays with me is the ending where the veil of reality is stripped away so as to suggest that we've all been living an illusion. All in all, this is nice spin-off of the Lovecraft universe.