num_pages: 389
description: From the award-winning author and New Yorker contributor a riveting novel about secrets and scandals psychiatry and pulp fiction inspired by the lives of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. 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.
language: English
title: The Night Ocean
publisher: Penguin Press