i am providence the life and times of hp lovecraft

I remember being shocked to see such a small turn out for some pretty amazing authors. The second convention I went to was a small SF/F/H literary con also in San Diego, where the panels averaged about 10-20 guests. It was a huge deal, but you could still buy tickets easily enough and you didn’t have to camp out overnight waiting to get into the panels. The first convention I ever went to was San Diego Comic Con, right around 1998.

Not entirely wasted time, but not a book I'd easily recommend. The conclusion felt thrown together and the purposely vague ending was forced. But the driver behind the novel, the murder mystery, sputters and lurches and is just largely unsatisfying.

The author hits the right notes in making the cast of characters ring true and the petty infighting, awkward social interactions, and sometimes myopic fawning of the community can be cutting. Having briefly frequented a few anime conventions, the portrait of the Lovecraft convention circuit was believable and sometimes painfully funny (and desperate). I think I enjoyed the book, the alternation of live narrator (and Lovecraftian newbie author) and murder victim (established Lovecraftian regular) was a neat conceit, especially the chapters from the newly dead point of view. A darkness where Panossian is waiting, spending a lot of time thinking about Colleen, narrating a new Lovecraftian tale that could very well spell her doom.Ī maddening mixture of, on the one hand, witty satire and sharp observations and, on the other hand, convoluted mystery and flat characters. So she delves deep into the darkness, where occult truths have been lurking since the beginning of time. Everyone at the convention is a possible suspect, but only Colleen seems to show any interest in solving the murder. The Summer Tentacular continues uninterrupted, except by a few bumbling police.

What's more unsettling is that, in the aftermath of the murder, there is little concern among the convention goers. Colleen's trip spirals into a nightmare when her roommate for the weekend, an obnoxious novelist known as Panossian, turns up dead, his face neatly removed. Horror writer Colleen Danzig doesn't know what to expect when she arrives, but is unsettled to find that among the hob-knobbing between scholars and literary critics are a group of real freaks: book collectors looking for volumes bound in human skin, and true believers claiming the power to summon the Elder God Cthulhu, one of their idol's most horrific fictional creations, before the weekend is out. Lovecraft, there is nothing bigger than the annual Providence-based convention called the Summer Tentacular.

I am providence the life and times of hp lovecraft