brendan halpin

A guy goes off the deep end searching for the truth behind a probably-forged HP Lovecraft diary, and then his wife goes looking for him and gets sucked into a confounding web of contradictory stories.

I mean, I’m a sucker for this kind of thing—forbidden but possibly forged texts, stories within stories, and, because Lovecraft, a big helping of existential dread.

So far so good. I also really enjoyed the fact that the author did not shy away from Lovecraft’s virulent racism and anti-semitism. Indeed, his status as a frightened, hateful little man is quite central to the narrative.

And it was also really fun for me to see all these celebrity cameos (if you consider weird fiction writers of the early 20th century to be celebrities, which I do). I enjoyed the puzzle of the multiple nesting narratives, and the book ultimately has a lot of really interesting ideas about the importance of storytelling and its centrality to identity.

(I learned after I finished the book that the author died in 2023, and it’s a credit to how immersed I was in his novel that features between one and four faked deaths that my first reaction was “oh yeah, sure he did.”)

Having said all that, Paul La Farge was a product of the Literary Industrial Complex, with all the right residencies, fellowships, and faculty appointments. As such, this book displays some of the characteristics fo Literary Industrial Complex fiction, the first of which being a disdain for suspense and plot momentum. There are several compelling mysteries in this book, but La Farge seems to go out of his way to make sure we’re not gripped by any of them by making the stories within a story SO LONG. I nearly put the book aside due to lack of plot momentum, but I was on a weekend vacation and had time to plow through, so I did.

You’re also not allowed to get weird or supernatural in the Literary Industrial Complex unless you do it with an ironic distance and a knowing wink at the readers letting them know you know they’re better than this. So this narrative looks like it’s going into weird fiction territory a couple of times but ultimately doesn’t. I think going all in on the weirdness would have improved things.

There are also no female characters of note, including the narrators. Women in this book are props in men’s stories, which just felt kind of 1970s to me. It’s funny that the author is quite tuned in to Lovecraft’s bigotry but ignores the deep misogyny of the entire “golden age” speculative fiction clique. Asimov shows up a couple of times and his “handsiness,” as it would have been euphemized at the time, never comes up.

So, can I recommend this book? I mean, it’s not one I’ll be pressing into people’s hands, all, “you have to read this.” But it’s smart and thought-provoking and ultimately satisfying, even if it’s kind of a slog.