The Assaults of Chaos: A Novel about H.P. Lovecraft

Weird-fiction scholar Joshi (Unutterable Horror) turns the subjects of his critical writing into flesh-and-blood characters with powerful imaginations in this reverential genuflection to H.P. Lovecraft and the horror writers who inspired him. It is 1914, and a 24-year old Lovecraft (who has yet to publish any fiction) is in a state of personal stasis in the home he shares with his brow-beating mother in Providence, R.I. Salvation comes when a man who represents himself as the father whom Lovecraft long presumed dead recruits Lovecraft and his former lover, Kathleen Banigan, to sail to England on a secret mission mandated by the outbreak of the Great War. Once there, they assemble an entourage of the greatest weird-fiction writers of the day%E2%80%94Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and William Hope Hodgson%E2%80%94and apply themselves to the formidable task that "is nothing less than to preserve the imaginative essence of this great nation." Joshi does a superb job of humanizing the titans of the weird fiction genre, whom most readers know only through the fiction they wrote and bits of arid biographical detail, and in the book's most memorable chapter he stages a meeting-of-the-minds-type discussion of the art of the weird tale in which each writer speaks to the subject in passages drawn largely from his own writings. Though the story eventually devolves into the man-against-monster slugfest common to Lovecraftian pastiches, it merits praise as one of the more original recent forays into Lovecraftian horror, and will appeal to any enthusiast with an interest in Lovecraft and the literary influences that he translated into his masterpieces of weird fiction. (Aug.)