Marina Willett 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. 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, a psychiatrist, doesn't believe them. A tour de force of storytelling inspired by Lovecraft and his gang.
Author Biography
Paul La Farge is the author of the novels The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), and Luminous Airplanes (2011), as well as The Facts of Winter (2005), a book of imaginary dreams. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Believer, McSweeney's, Nautilus, Conjunctions and elsewhere. He has won the Bard Fiction Prize, two California Book Awards, and the Bay Area Book Critics' Award for fiction. In 2013-14 he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
