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Penguin Press
March 2017
On Sale: March 7, 2017
396 pages ISBN: 1101981083 EAN: 9781101981085 Kindle: B01HNJIJYE Hardcover / e-Book
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Mystery | Thriller | Historical
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.
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