The Night Ocean

"Yes – which actually predates some of those others I mentioned. LaFarge is the only writer on the list who’s not really a science fiction or fantasy writer. I learned after turning in this list that he died a few weeks ago . He had written for The New Yorker , had written some mainstream literary fiction, and he was clearly fascinated by the history of Lovecraft. This novel is largely about Lovecraft, and the possibility of his secret gay love life with a man in Florida: but the investigation into this question leads LaFarge into all parts of the history of science fiction and pulp magazine. So everybody from Isaac Asimov to Frederik Pohl to Donald Wollheim, all show up as characters. There’s even a teenage Ursula Le Guin , who we meet as the daughter of a pair of anthropologists at Berkeley. So he’s clearly having a lot of fun with a whole history of the genre, and at the same time, rediscovering and possibly undermining not only Lovecraft, but a lot of the pulp traditions that he was fascinated with. It demonstrates that somebody who doesn’t, as far as I know, come from the science fiction community can be equally fascinated by all these characters and larger-than-life figures that inhabited it for 30 or 40 years. The plot almost begins as a mystery, with a woman whose husband seems increasingly obsessed with finding out what happened to Lovecraft. And there’s one incident, which I gather is historically real: Lovecraft, who famously never left Providence, Rhode Island where he grew up – he was married for a while, but he lived basically with his aunts – for some time, for some reason, he spent a couple of weeks in Florida with this young fan named R. H. Barlow . And no one knows what happened there. There’s no record at all. So the beginning of the novel is the husband, obsessively trying to track down evidence of what happened, which leads him into a mystery investigation, which in turn leads to all these stories within stories within stories of pulp fiction. There’s not really any Lovecraftian Horror – and that’s the other thing, it’s not really a science fiction novel. It’s not a supernatural novel, except that it may be a kind of alternate history – maybe these characters, who didn’t really encounter each other, did in this novel. It’s clearly somebody having a lot of fun, but keeping everything strictly aligned with this mystery investigation plot. So it’s a compelling book to read, even if you’re not fascinated by Lovecraft and the others."