The Night Ocean | Paul La Farge

My review of Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean ran today in the Boston Globe.

Hey, how cool is this book cover? Really spectacular. Publishers Weekly has a story up about how the cover came to be, which features examples of rejected options and the one they ended up with was far and away the best.

The others are… I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I doubt I would’ve been inclined to pick up a book wrapped in this cover.

The Night Ocean is advertised as a mystery related to the life of H.P. Lovecraft, but it’s much much more than that. La Farge uses Lovecraft as a jumping off point to delve into some really interesting storytelling about R.H. Barlow, a tragic, real-life Lovecraft associate, and about the quirky personalities involved science fiction fandom during the 1930s and ’40s. At first, I wasn’t sure where La Farge was heading, but the deeper I got into his multiple, overlapping narratives, the more impressed I was.