Carter and Lovecraft by Jonathan L Howard

B

Carter & Lovecraft

I am huge, rabid fan of the Joannes Cabal series by Jonathan L Howard. I might be a little in love with Joannes Cabal, which is super, super fucked up. Regardless, when I saw that Howard was writing a new series with the word “Lovecraft” in it, I went “Ooooooh.”

Carter and Lovecraft acts largely as a start to the series and a platform for world building, and as such I’m inclined to cut it a little more slack than I usually do. First books in series are usually my least favorite books. At times Carter and Lovecraft suffers from slow pacing and too much exposition, but when I got about two-thirds of the way in, things ramped up considerably.

This book is part ode of Lovecraft and part noir detective fiction. Former homicide detective Daniel Carter quit his job after some Weird Shit happened. He’s working as a PI when he finds out that he inherited a small Providence, RI bookstore. He checks it out to find that the bookstore is run by all-around-badass and descendant of HP Lovecraft, Emily. The fact that Lovecraft’s direct and only descendant is a woman of color is so fucking awesome, I can’t even.

Carter and Lovecraft are drawn more deeply into a nefarious plot related to the aforementioned Weird Shit and it all ties into the works of HP Lovecraft.

One thing I loved is that Carter and Lovecraft make an excellent team. He’s all grimdark noir detective, and Emily Lovecraft is the new heroine of my heart. She keeps a sawed off shotgun under the counter of the bookstore in case she gets robbed and puts the political autobiographies in front of it because, look, if a book is gonna shot in the crossfire, it’s gonna be the political autobiographies, okay?

One thing that Carter and Lovecraft does better than a lot of other homages to Lovecraft’s writing is really capture the terror HP created. It’s not about tentacle monsters; it’s about finding out how small you are on the cosmic scale, about being rendered totally insignificant to alien and awful things. It’s about a mind-rending sense of otherness and smallness. A lot of authors just go the monster route, and I was glad to see Howard didn’t.

Like I said, this book lagged at times, but it more than made up for it at the end. Also the end was…wow. I cannot, CANNOT wait for the next book because the reveal was huge and I really think this series is going to be amazing.

– Elyse

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, 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.