Carter & Lovecraft
A Novel
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From author Jonathan L. Howard comes the start of a thrilling supernatural series that brings the H.P. Lovecraft mythos into the twenty-first century, optioned by Warner Bros TV.
Daniel Carter used to be a homicide detective, but his last case -- the hunt for a serial killer -- went wrong in strange ways and soured the job for him. Now he's a private investigator trying to live a quiet life. Strangeness, however, has not finished with him. First he inherits a bookstore in Providence from someone he's never heard of, along with an indignant bookseller who doesn't want a new boss. She's Emily Lovecraft, the last known descendant of H.P. Lovecraft, the writer from Providence who told tales of the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods, creatures and entities beyond the understanding of man. Then people start dying in impossible ways, and while Carter doesn't want to be involved, but he's beginning to suspect that someone else wants him to be. As he reluctantly investigates, he discovers that Lovecraft's tales were more than just fiction, and he must accept another unexpected, and far more unwanted inheritance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This refreshingly original novel updates the eldritch horrors of H.P. Lovecraft for the 21st century. Dan Carter, a New York cop turned PI, heads to Providence, R.I., to claim a windfall inheritance from an unknown benefactor. That inheritance includes Hill's Books, an antiquarian bookstore run by Emily Lovecraft, a descendant of the great horror writer. (Her African-American heritage may be a sly nod to recent discussions of Lovecraft's racism.) Shortly afterward, Dan and Emily cross paths with William Colt, a student at local Clave College, whose mathematical savvy has given him access to the Twist, a perceptual portal to the Lovecraftian otherworld of cosmic horrors. Their confrontation proves to have been engineered by master manipulators with their own cosmic agenda, which Howard (the Johannes Cabal series) reveals gradually through the intercession of members from one of Lovecraft's quasi-human families. Howard sometimes makes explicit ideas that Lovecraft more effectively suggested, but his novel shows a thorough understanding of Lovecraft's conceptual horrors and features an ending that cleverly bears out those concepts.
