The Night Ocean
Ratings4
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings4
Average rating3.5
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
I've never read H.P. Lovecraft, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this book, which involves a quest to discover the truth about a book called The Erotonomicon, purportedly written by Lovecraft himself. The Night Ocean is stories within stories, searches for truth in dark places, impersonations (or is it transmigration of souls?), disappearances, and and coming back from the dead.
The story about Lovecraft and his teenage friend Robert Barlow is framed by a present day story about a psychologist, Marina, and her missing husband, presumed dead by suicide. Charlie, Marina's husband, had gone into a deep depression after his intensively researched book about The Erotonomicon was attacked and exposed as a hoax by Lovecraft experts. After Charlie's presumed suicide, Marina re traces her husband's research to try to understand what happened to him. This frame feels essential to the story because it reinforces the themes of the Lovecraft story, but it's also the flimsiest part of the book.
For science fiction fans, this would be a fun book to read because of the history of early “weird fiction” and the cameo appearances by classic authors (Ursula LeGuin was my favorite). I'm still not tempted to read any H.P. Lovecraft on the strength of this book, but I do recommend The Night Ocean as a creepy story that goes deep.
