It's hard for me to rate this book because it's a puzzle with different stories. Some I found fascinating while others a little slow. Marina just lost her husband Charlie. He seems to have escaped a psychiatric facility and drowned himself in a lake. Charlie had recently become obsessed with HP Lovecraft and a supposedly infamous book called The Erotonomicon, that exposed him as a promiscuous gay pedophile. This part, the mystery involving Marina, Charlie and their problems was engrossing. I was really invested in their relationship and his bizarre disappearance. I wanted Marina to recover from her loss and could not read fast enough. Then there was the story of The Erotonomicon. I love Lovecraft and I'm not even sure if the part about him being an antisemite is true, but his books are awesome. That story was interesting, Then there is another story within the story... and the more convoluted the plot got, the slower my reading became. I would have given 5 stars to Marina's story and between 2 and 3 for other parts of the book. I'm splitting the difference and giving it 4. It is very well written, I just found it confusing at times.

When I put The Night Ocean on my reading list, I thought that it was a mystery novel. In a way, it is but it is a very different mystery novel than any I have read before. Actually, I can't say that I've read any books very much like this one before. Marina's husband, Charlie, is a writer who stumbles across a counterfeit diary of H.P. Lovecraft. The diary describes various acts between Lovecraft and underage young men. Charlie attempts to find out who wrote the diary and ends up becoming obsessed, in the process.

I felt that this novel is more science-fiction than thriller or mystery. While there are some mystery elements in the story, a reader would enjoy this book more if they were a fan of science-fiction. There were times where I actually felt like I was standing in the middle of a comic book convention. The writing could be clunky, at times, and this led to a reading that was slower than I would have liked. The characters saved this book for me. Chris is such an interesting character and is so complex. Chris is the kind of character that I would like to hang out if he were real. He doesn't let anyone else tell him who he needs to be or how he should act. He will interact with anyone, no matter their backgrounds or interests (or even their morals). Even though he becomes obsessed with L.C. Spinks, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, Charlie's character still remains complex. Marina's love for Charlie and her belief in him is strong. Charlie's obsessions become Marina's obsessions, too. While I can't say that I enjoyed this book, I did enjoy the characters and I do think there is an audience for this type of work. If this had been advertised more as a science-fiction mystery than a mystery/thriller, I think it would have found a better home. Science-fiction is really not my forte so I was often left confused and feeling like an outsider. This book would be better for a science-fiction reader.

At first, I was drawn into the story with its detailed introduction into the life of Lovecraft and the scandal of his time spent with Barlow. While it was interesting to read about, I soon began to wonder when the story was going to kick in. At the midpoint, I started to see some direction and discover how Charlie got involved in this story. But this glimpse also vanished fairly quickly, as the author spent countless chapters recounting the experiences of Barlow, Lovecraft, Spinks, and a whole host of other characters. Pretty soon, I got lost in the details of the story - and not in a good way. I came into this story with one expectation and left this story completely clueless. I'm sure I missed something somewhere but for the life of me, I couldn't fathom the point of this story. I felt as if nothing meaningful was ever really said throughout this entire novel, and it left me disappointed. There are some raving reviews for this novel on Goodreads, so maybe I am one of the few for whom this novel just didn't work. If you like literary fiction and Lovecraft, then I'm sure you would enjoy this novel.

Well that was odd.

I loved Carter & Lovecraft so when this story came up on NetGalley I couldn't resist. A psychiatrists husband becomes obsessed with Lovecraft then mysteriously disappears?!?! I cried Cthulhu and sat down to read some spooky supernatural stuff. Yeah, that wasn't this book.

This book is about the lives and loves of homosexual writers of the 30s through 50s with a little Keyser Söze thrown in. It was interesting in a life-is-sometime-stranger-than-fiction way but I didn't enjoy reading about the sex lives of real and unattractive odd people.

I think if you were reading this as an LGBT book you might have gotten more out of it. Me, I was just glad it was short.

Received an ARC for an unbiased review of THE NIGHT OCEAN by Paul La Farge.

This is not a book one can pick up and put down to come back to in a few days, nor is it really a book one can read in a location where there are much distractions. I would find myself having to back up over a few pages to try to remember the where/who/what of the current place in the book.

La Farge has a unique writing style, intertwining the voices of several narrators almost seamlessly, allowing us to believe, as readers, that an entire section is true, only to be told in the next section, that large pieces of it were...in fact...a lie. It was an absolute mindfuck and totally worth the time it took to read it.

This book is an attempt to tell the story of H.P. Lovecraft's relationship with Robert Barlow, a teenage fan, in the 30s. Or maybe it is an attempt to find out what happened to Charlie Willett, who was investigating Lovecraft's and Barlow's relationship when he disappeared. Or perhaps it's an attempt to discover whether L.C. Spinx ever existed or was a figment of Barlow's imagination. But it's certainly about relationships, and it is very much about Lovecraft.

If you like your books highly enigmatic, your characters slippery, your plots convoluted, your narrators unrealiable, and your endings inconclusive, this is the book for you! There's a sense of disorientation that mimics the disorientation Lovecraft's own writing inspires.

And if you are a Lovecraft fan, this is a must-read.

When one man’s obsession with a legendary H.P. Lovecraft text drives him to suicide, his wife follows in his footsteps in an attempt to understand the man she thought she knew. This is the premise of The Night Ocean, Paul La Farge‘s latest novel, but the narrative seems to get lost somewhere along the path.

It’s hard to shake the notion that La Farge may have begun writing The Night Ocean as a fictionalized account of Lovecraft’s life, into which he shoehorned Charlie and Marina at a later date. Indeed, La Farge’s novel would likely have worked better as a piece of Lovecraft fanfiction, and would have fit right in with recent books like The Ballad of Black Tom and Lovecraft Country. As it stands, however, The Night Ocean leaves readers adrift and aimless in the doldrums.

A novel purporting to use one of Lovecraft’s favorite tropes — Go Mad from the Revelation — as the result of reading too much Lovecraft should, in all honesty, be an easy-to-love book for eldritch abomination fans like this reviewer. Although it employs plenty of Lovecraftian mischief, The Night Ocean fumbles. What begins with a woman’s re-tracing of her husband’s fateful journey soon descends into an overly long excerpt from Lovecraft apocrypha, before morphing into the re-telling of said work, debrided of poetic license. At which point, the reader is so far removed from the original story frame that she no longer cares to find out what happened to Charlie, and the dry fictionalization of Lovecraft’s life is not gripping enough to sustain her interest.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

This is a novel that is enigmatic mystery wrapped in historical and honest prose. Marina is never quite able to catch up and as a reader you're cheering for her while simultaneously trying to stay steps ahead of Lovecraft or Barlow. There is a love story seeped in want and need that is always teetering at the edge of unrequited satisfaction. Characters searching for truth and answers, though it is sometimes indistinguishable as to what is actually true and what is an interpretation of the truth. There are a few slow parts but they are few and far between. I cannot express passionately enough what a breathtaking whirlwind this novel is and just how truly fantastic it is. The Night Ocean gives you so much and asks for nothing in return except to be read and read again.

I got lost in this book, and not in a good way. I thought I was going to be reading a book about a woman searching for her husband who may or may not have been dead and learn a bit about an author I was unfamiliar with. Instead the book was a maze of real or made up stories about several other people, including actual people: H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. At one point in time I stopped reading and did a little research on Lovecraft and Barlow thinking that might help me connect with the story. I am not sure it did. Additional cameos are played by several other real people but were the events fact or fiction? By the end I felt that the story I had thought I was reading, about Marina and her husband Charles’ disappearance, was only an excuse for Mr. La Farge to write fan fiction about Mr. Lovecraft and related persons.

This book was not a good fit for me. I will not post on-line for I do not think it is fair to the author as my review would be a negative one.

This is one of the most interesting and complex books I have ever read. There's so much going on- one plot layered upon another and then another. It's hard to really explain what it's about other than just rehashing the summary that you can find on the top of this page. But I guess, in a word, it's about searching. Searching for a deeper meaning, a hidden truth, a new life.

Coming in to this, I'd only ever read a couple of HP Lovecraft's stories and knew nothing of his life. I think that was for the best. I was along for the ride no matter how far it strayed from reality.

Was looking forward to getting a sneak peak at this advanced copy of Paul La Farge's novel which fanboy's H.P. Lovecraft. However, when the novel excerpted at length a faux Lovecraft tome about sex written in middle English, I began to struggle. Ultimately, I found that I decided to put this one aside for now. (No Rating because I did not complete the book).

The author did a good job telling the story, but there were times when I thought the book was rather dry and devoid of interesting events to keep it moving along. In between those stretches though, was some fantastic writing. There is a lot of information and history crammed into this book. It was a great read but almost an overload to push the plot.

Wow. Just wow. The sheer insanity of reading his behemoth in one day actually kind of goes along with the sheer awesomeness of this book. And to think I was merely expecting a bibliomystery. Night Ocean is so much more, it's the stacking doll of storytelling, where the inventions are weaved into real life facts so seemingly, it'll make you question the fabric of reality itself, much as it did to its characters. There are quite a few storylines here, all connected, enough for several books, all essentially preoccupied with a quest for truth. The main plot is about a wife whose dearly beloved overly enthusiastic nerd of a husband gets obsessed with writing a story exposing a certain very famous person's private predilections. The story takes over his life, their lives, until a tragedy leaves the wife unable to move on and determined to find out the truth on her own or to dare to solve the puzzle of Spinks. Seriously, there is such a thing here, it's the crux of the novel and it's a smart sad surprise. That's the basic shell, the innards, though, the innards of this thing are epic. It's a literary hoax of a literary hoax, strikingly clever, stunningly original. It's a love letter, of sorts, to a bygone era of the golden age of weird fiction and early scifi, it has a cast to make any fan of speculative stories swoon. It's a historical drama, it spans decades and countries and continents. It's a story of obsession, a love story, several love stories, actually. It's a deceit wrapped in a perfidy wrapped in a tall tale. And underneath it's a meditation on the nature of the alienating state of being, devastating loneliness and desperate search for meaning that makes us more than just a random collection of atoms. Or, of course, to honor the source here, meaningless carbon based bipeds waiting to be annihilated by the indifferent universe. It isn't a perfect book, it would be nice to see homosexuality not so closely associated with pederasty for example or the main female protagonist to be stronger. She's very likeable and compelling, but her slavish devotion to her cheating lying lackluster spouse whom she supports unconditionally emotionally and financially for years was sort of off putting. Yes, she is obviously the dreamy sort, she constantly reads Jane Austen to prove it, but she's also a psychologist, it seems that she should be somewhat more self aware. Unless of course it's the proverbial case of the cobbler without shoes. But those are really minor details comparing to the grand total, which is genuinely terrific. The experience of reading this book is comparable to asking for a shoulder rub and getting a full body massage. It just gives the reader so much more than was expected. It's dense, but so interesting and so well written, the pages go by quickly despite the heavy subject matter. It's literary, it's smart, it's a beauty of book. If my review seems somewhat generic it's strictly to preserve the mystery of the story with its myriad of twists and turns. The goal is for the zeal to come through clearly, while leaving the plot opaque. Most enthusiastically recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

Started out thinking this was a fabricated story about fictitious authors, instead it turned into a story of obscure fiction writers. I say obscure but that is only to myself as there was only one name I had ever heard of and that was Isaac Asimov and I do not know for sure if he is the who was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University and a great fiction writer. A quick visit to a web site did indeed produce these names. Most of these were before my time and not writers of any genres of interest to me. The first few chapters were somewhat tedious but the book evolved into an interesting story of a search for the truth about certain authors. A tale of a most interesting and somewhat intriguing life is spun. It turns out the spinner of that story, a Mr. Leo Spinks, was a prevaricator, an imposter, (no web site verified his existence). I can recommend this book as an enjoyable reading experience but be aware of a degree of homosexual activity, it is not graphic and I did not find it offensive but other readers might. I look at the story now as an education about some of the science fiction writers of past years.

Struggled through the beginning. The minutia of the relationship with the boy was a bit much. However, it picked up towards the end, and became more enjoyable.

Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean is a puzzling, esoteric novel about a struggling writer and his wife in New York City told from the wife’s point of view after Charlie, the writer, mysteriously vanishes after spiraling into a sort of madness after investigating an obscure, possibly fake biography of HP Lovecraft telling of his relationship with teenage writer Robert Barlow in the 1930s. As Charlie then his wife Marina begin to peel away the layers of the alleged illicit pairing of Lovecraft and Barlow, nothing is what it seems and the validity of the tale is never to be fully trusted. Or is it? La Farge sometimes conjures the otherworldly mystery of Lovecraft’s prose mixed with a Rashomon level of contradiction of the truth. This is a story about the reality of fiction and also the fiction of our reality. It’s about perception, personality, the darkness of McCarthy-era witch hunting and the unspeakable shame of homosexuality in the past. I enjoyed the uniqueness of the story and admired how it jumped from eras and locations from Mexico City to Canada and included everyone from William Burroughs to Issac Asimov to Diego Rivera within its narrative, but ultimately I felt it a bit slow and redundant. There’s much here to recommend, though, as The Night Ocean is a fascinating, possibly true or most definitely not novel.

Unfortunately this book just wasn't for me. I didn't find myself interested in the story or the characters. I wasn't sure if I was reading true information about HP Lovecraft or false information so I kept having to look online to keep up with what I was learning. I wish you lots of luck! I am sure your book will find its audience.

Review: THE NIGHT OCEAN by Paul LaFarge

A stunning and complex novel. THE NIGHT OCEAN is an extraordinary literary contribution to fiction focusing on the life of Weird Fiction icon H. P. Lovecraft. It has impacted me as powerfully as did Jacqueline Baker' s THE BROKEN HOUR, published in April 2016. Both novels vivify, but not idolize, HPL, who as an individual was troubled, often fearful, and certainly not politically correct.

THE NIGHT OCEAN, in its exploration of "truths" in Lovecraft' s life, on a deeper level explores Truth in abstract. Stories founded on hoaxes founded on lies-triggered by revenge? Jealousy? Egotism? Hatred? Love? Along the way we are treated to Pre-World War II Hungary and Canada and New York City, the rise of science fiction fandom, the early maneuvers of famous names in science fiction, the aftermath of a concentration camp, and academia in Mexico City post-World War II. We see the rampage of McCarthyism, anti-Communism, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. An intense theme throughout is reputations--how they are constructed and how they are trashed, both subtly and blatantly. Always underlying all is the 20th century's received views on homosexuality, and the costs for those for whom this is the preferred orientation.