2016 Lovecraftian SF, first of a series. Owen Merrill is a student at
Miskatonic, doing his thesis on Rhetorics of Otherness in the Horror
Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft…
File this next to Ruthanna Emrys' Innsmouth Legacy, which
started to come out the following year: it's another story that takes
the approach that both Lovecraft and what he wrote about did actually
exist, but doesn't regard his foreigner- and seafood-haunted
perspective as the only valid one.
There's an odd dislocation of place and time: our hero was a soldier
in Iraq, so I assume the story is meant to be more or less
contemporary, but nobody has a mobile phone and the Internet is barely
mentioned. There's also an awful lot of name-checking in the first
chapters: if you don't know your Lovecraft, Smith, Machen, Howard, and
so on, you may become quite frustrated at the way half the names are
clearly Significant.
But then things change quite substantially, and the story proper gets
going. And this isn't just doing the same thing as Emrys: there are
cover-ups and rational explanations and everything can easily be
explained away, until suddenly it can't and you're swimming in the
deep water off the end of the pier.
This does mean that there's quite a bit of exposition, and even the
action sequences seem to move quite slowly; it's all rather mannered.
There are parts of Lovecraft that are simply ignored because they
wouldn't fit well into the argument that's being constructed (or
perhaps they'll be dealt with in later books). Still, if you want to
write about a conspiracy behind large parts of civilisation without
sounding like a paranoid idiot, Greer does a rather better job than
Ernest Cline managed in Armada.
On the other side, and I'm guessing this may be because Greer feels
that the ideas are more important than the people, our hero makes very
few decisions of his own, and the Wise Mentor, Love Interest and
Villain Whom The Hero Could Have Been are all rolled out on cue. Owen
makes a few gestures to try to deal with the reader's disbelief at his
ready acceptance of all the weirdness, but they never quite convince.
Fun, but with better characters could have been great.
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