In our latest review for the Countdown to Hallowe’en 2016, Randy reviews a recent Lovecraftian novel:
And there it was. Right there. An actual psycho wall.
— from Carter & Lovecraft
Daniel Carter, former detective, quit the force after watching Charlie Hammond kill himself. Daniel and Charlie had just moments before cornered, and Hammond had shot, Martin Suydam, the serial killer known as Child-Catcher. As Suydam lay laughing and dying, Carter began searching for the most recent kidnap victim and upon returning found Charlie laughing and crying, and too late to stop his partner from putting his service weapon in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
Months pass, dreams of that night recur and his memory of Suydam’s psycho wall, a rare find outside movies and TV shows, includes a sense of underlying meaning in the pictures and crisscrossing strings pinned there. Unable to shake his funk Carter quits to become a private investigator. Not a great life and not lucrative, but he’s his own boss when the eccentric Henry Weston of the prestigious law firm of Weston Edmunds finds him and informs him he is now the owner of Alfred Hill’s residence in Providence. Carter is confused since he didn’t know Hill and, oh, yeah, Hill disappeared seven years ago and so is presumed dead under the law. Carter’s cop instincts go on red alert.
Weston didn’t mention that Hill resided above his business or that Hill’s niece, Emily, has been running the business in Hill’s absence. And so, when Carter reluctantly goes to Providence, a city he dislikes, he finds he owns a bookstore and he meets Emily Lovecraft, a young African-American woman well aware of the racist tendencies of her distant relative, H. P. Lovecraft, and rather smugly pleased at the disquiet her existence would have caused the old gent. She’s also aware of the significance of the name Carter.
Carter has been set up, not knowing that his own ancestor, Randolph Carter, by most people believed to be a fictional character in Lovecraft’s stories, was a real person who shared occult knowledge with H.P. Lovecraft. Soon these younger Carter and Lovecraft have to work together to learn what their forefathers knew and try to stem another threat from Outside.
Howard’s writing is spare and moves the story along at a good pace. The novel is as full of incident and event as any good mystery as Lovecraft and Carter try to understand what they are facing while contending with a rich, vapid young politician, a graduate student with supernatural powers, and an old, seemingly devolved family planted on a spit of land along Waite Road biding their time until the world turns into what they want instead of what it is.
Like Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (link HERE), Howard’s story springs from H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” (review HERE), and Howard’s approach to the racism in the story is more off-hand and oblique than LaValle’s, alluding to it then going on, creating in Emily Lovecraft a character intelligent, knowledgeable, tenacious and courageous; her rapport and partnership with Carter grows with believable ebb and flow as the story continues.
As supernatural adventure/mysteries go, this is a good, fun read and I would not be surprised to learn Howard is writing a sequel; it almost demands one.
Other Lovecraft-inspired novels:
Other Lovecraft-inspired novels:
The Croning by Laird Barron
The Red Tree & The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan
Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard (2015, St. Martin’s Press)
317 pages
ISBN: 978-1250060891
