“The opportunity to peek beneath the shiny, leathery surface of the great man’s life in the guise of a fictional yarn is irresistible.”
In the cold spring of 1936, Arthor Crandle, down-on-his luck and desperate for work, accepts a position in Providence, Rhode Island, as a live-in secretary/assistant for an unnamed shut-in.
He arrives at the gloomy colonial-style house to discover that his strange employer is an author of disturbing, bizarre fiction. Health issues have confined him to his bedroom, where he is never to be disturbed. But the writer, who Crandle knows only as “Ech-Pi,” refuses to meet him, communicating only by letters left on a table outside his room.
Soon the home reveals other unnerving peculiarities. There is an ominous presence Crandle feels on the main stairwell. Light shines out underneath the door of the writer’s room, but is invisible from the street. It becomes increasingly clear there is something not right about the house or its occupant.
Haunting visions of a young girl in a white nightgown wandering the walled-in garden behind the house motivate Crandle to investigate the circumstances of his employer’s dark family history. Meanwhile, the unsettling aura of the house pulls him into a world increasingly cut off from reality, into black depths, where an unspeakable secret lies waiting..
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
Using the real life of Lovecraft as the bones on which this novel is draped, The Broken Hours offers us something different to the usual world of Cthulu in the form of a biography / fiction hybrid. Of course, anything Lovecraftian is always worth a look and so the opportunity to peek beneath the shiny, leathery surface of the great man’s life in the guise of a fictional yarn is irresistible.
The Broken Hours: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft is out on 25 April 2017 and is available from Amazon.
RICHARD COSGROVE