WARNING: THE FOLLOWING POST WILL RUIN THIS NOVEL IF YOU HAVE NOT READ IT! READ THE BOOK FIRST OR CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

I just want to preface that I do not know Paul La Farge. I’ve never met him, spoken with him, seen him in public, nor claim to know anything about the man and his personal life. I am confident that he’s an upstanding, well-to-do person who is generally kind and a nice person – and a person who understands the importance of books and the fun that comes in writing them.

That being said, Paul La Farge is a bastard – a devious man with an insidious mind. I say this in the nicest way possible and can only say this after having read his work. For it is the mind of Paul La Farge that has given life to one of the most pernicious antagonists ever conceived in fiction.

An overreaction, you say? Perhaps, but only to an outside observer, one who may not yet have read La Farge’s book The Night Ocean, a book I had been following since deciding I wanted to spend more time reading. I’ve kicked off this year with as much as I can find of contemporary books with Lovecraft inspired themes, and this one was near the top of the list. And after finishing it almost a month ago, I still cannot shake the feelings I have for the book’s antagonist, and I need to get my feelings out there before they eat me alive, from the inside out.

Don’t misunderstand me, however, because I truly enjoyed this book, all the way through. I was engaged the entire time, and just because it made me feel negative emotions did not make it bad, by any stretch. So do yourself a favor and go read the book first and experience it, because I feel it is worth it. Consider this a spoiler warning, and be warned, for this will ruin the true nature of the book. Read it, love it, hate it, come back and we can talk about it.

Betrayal

If you truly don’t care about this book, don’t like Paul La Farge, or care about Lovecraft, I suppose you can read on. If you need a quick reminder, here’s the premise:

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.

I found this book while collecting things to read for this coming year, part of my attempt to try and read 100 books by the New Year. I wanted to find some Lovecraft inspired things, and this was on the list. Not quite the horror trip I was looking for, but it involved Lovecraft, and a scandal I thought could make for an interesting read. It’s that part I should have paid more attention to.

…and betray it.

I skipped over that bit, thinking it just a few buzzwords to end off on – something people who write the tags for books would throw in to finish off the thought. I didn’t expect it to mean anything, and if it did, to be a betrayal of the characters.

Not to me, a person living outside the narrative of the book.

For those who are curious about the book, like I was, and for those who do not plan to read it, I can tell you that The Night Ocean is about Lovecraft, and also isn’t. There’s the main plot, which concerns Marina and her husband Charlie, and the rise and fall of his fame in covering the story about Lovecraft, much of which concerns the testimony of the found Robert Barlow, which makes up the B plot. In this other side of the narrative, Charlie (and the reader) are tasked with dissecting the mystery of Robert Barlow, or is he L.C. Spinks, the enigmatic producer of the fictitious Erotinomicon that perpetrated the scandal in the first place?

This question spirals out of control as we battle with the competing stories of Robert Barlow/Spinks, trying to figure out if he is who he says he is when detractors come forward and point out that his story doesn’t add up. In total, I would estimate that 50% of the book is dedicated solely to the stories told by Barlow/Spinks, which consist of post-modern delves into Barlow’s time spent which Lovecraft (which prove to be false) and then his time running from the lie he’s already told to Mexico (also false) and finally to how he ran from THAT lie and lived on the New York for a while and wanted to get back at the people who had wronged him concerning the Locvecraft fan community (you guessed it…). If that sentence ran on a little long, imagine what listening to Spinks’s life story for the third time was like.

Pernicious Incarnate

Here we arrive at where the true villainy of this character lies. At the end of the book, Marina appears to have solved the mystery, having listened to Spinks’s third confession, where he states that he believes her husband might still be alive, but in a more metaphorical way – like the way that someone can survive on through their writing (referencing authors like Lovecraft and Barlow). She’s exploring the small Canadian town that Spinks lives in when she happens to encounter a town historian in a used bookstore (convenient). When she brings up what she had heard from Spinks, he offers her some reading material on the subject, but when she tries to corroborate what Spinks had just told her from the hospital, she can’t find any evidence.

And the horrible, miserable truth sinks in.

She returns to Spinks’s home, where she breaks into his office and sees in his study the collected works and biographies of every person and setting referenced in his numerous stories – people and places he’s claimed to have associated with and places he had traveled through. All sculpted into the ultimate long-con for anyone who will listen, and each lie crafted to fit the desires and personalities of that individual so they’re more likely to believe it.

I, much like her, was livid as she drove back to the hospital and essentially accosted Spinks. She does not ask him what happened, but why this time, since now she knows that every story he’s told (50% of the book) has been a lie.

And what does he have to say for himself in response to deceiving Marina and the audience?

“I hate them. I hated them all.”

He just hates everyone in the world for being more interesting than he is, and so to everyone he meets who will give him the time to listen, he tells them an incredibly detailed, tailored life story that makes him out to be the most interesting, cathartic person in the modern era. All because of his disdain for people.

Spinks references something he calls “the transmigration of souls” in the book, a phenomenon which he believes occurs when one soul can inhabit another body, even while the original soul remains there. He claims this can happen, more or less, by reading someone else’s words or experiencing something personal from them that would open you up to that person. And that’s the rub.

Spinks has transmuted his soul into Marina and Charlie and everyone who will know his name – including the reader of the book. It doesn’t matter if we believe Spinks’s life story, or if we fact check him and prove that he was lying. The simple knowledge of his name is enough to make him significant in our minds, but the fact that he isn’t all that important is just the twist of the knife. We had to waste our time with the person trying to figure out if they are who they say they are, all while he trolls us from his geriatric hate throne.

Now, I’m stuck with this name, knowing that Spinks got what he wanted, and I hate him for it. The only way to defeat someone has diabolical as Spinks is to have never heard about him in the first place – it’s because of this very fact that I haven’t spoken the name to my wife, to free her from the knowledge of the most sinister character in fiction. Keep your Voldemort and your Sauron, characters who wield fire and death with a word. With his words, Spinks wields pure hate and a real magic of inhabiting others within their imaginations. He has taken stories, the thing that which I have devoted my life to, and weaponized it against those who would listen.

FIN

Like I said, I really loved the book. It created an experience that I’ve never had in reading something that wasn’t news about the President – or pure, unfiltered anger. I was slackjawed reading the final pages of the book, utterly destroyed having sat through the same false life story for the third time, only to hear that the only reason for this crime was out of hate, or to be something important when you were actually nothing. What kind of self-loathing do you have to possess to weaponize it against other people? So the experience shared by the reader and the character was one-to-one, a feat not many other novels can claim.

Go ahead and read The Night Ocean, but be prepared to deal with pure madness, the kind of dark forces Lovecraft tried to warn us about.