The Lovecraft Squad: All Hallows Horror

A haunted church unleashes a storm of supernatural horrors on a team of paranormal investigators in this confusingly plotted first novel of a projected trilogy. When the unearthing of a presumed lost Canterbury tale by Geoffrey Chaucer conjures nightmarish visions of All Hallows Church in south London, Bob Chambers, an agent in the Human Protection League (aka the Lovecraft Squad), descends upon the premises with investigative reporter Karen Shepworth and five other researchers. Almost immediately, malign influences drive them down into the church’s labyrinthine crypts and force them to run a gauntlet of woes appropriated from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Probert (Dead Shift) evokes horrors with cinematic vividness, but his attempts to link those of Dante’s Christian allegory to the cosmic terrors of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction is tenuous and unconvincing. His tale’s open ending leaves room for future explanation of the Lovecraft Squad, whose purpose and functions are frustratingly underdeveloped in this novel. (Mar.)