After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft, #2)

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This is the second book in what looks like an extended series featuring Dan Carter and Emily Lovecraft. Dan Carter is a private investigator and a retired New York cop. Lovecraft is the granddaughter of H.P. Lovecraft, the 1920s horror writer. In the last book, Carter and Lovecraft were thrown together as co-owners of a bookstore. In the midst of horrific murders, the pair gradually comes to realize that H.P. might have been describing a version of reality now lost. The story ends with Carter and Lovecraft “unfolding” the world and, presumably, entering into a world H.P. described with cults and ancient gods.

The end is enticing and suggested. The reader wants to know what that world looks like.

I found this book less well-realized than the precursor because, in my view, the world that was revealed was less than what had been promised. The pair find that Providence has been replaced by Arkham, and Arkham has a creepy Old-World vibe to it, but Arkham is set in an all-too cliche alternate history. The “unfolded world.” we discover, is the world where the Nazis developed a nuclear weapon in 1941 and nuked Moscow on the eve of Barbarosa. Germany emerged as the great world power, there was no Holocaust, England was reduced to a second-world state, and science and technology have advanced quite nicely.

Where is the weird?

For most of the book, we have the standard development of an alternate history novel as the characters deal with the differences between the world they remember and the world they now live in. Lovecraft discovers that her store has a copy of the Necronomicon, and is goaded into reading it by a mysterious figure. Carter is induced to work for a very nice Gestapo agent involved in a scientific project to harness “zero point energy” by the strange lawyer who was instrumental in his getting the bookstore.

The story finally kicks into weird gear toward the last 20 percent of the book when the action shifts to a climax on an island in Aleutians. There we find that the Nazis are very concerned in the folding and unfolding of the world; the Deep Ones make an appearance, and Carter and Lovecraft find that they have a powerful and mysterious ally.

I am not entirely happy with the unfolded world. I had hoped for more originality, and it isn't clear to me how H.P.'s fold in the 1920s is at all related to the Nazi victory in World War II, but I was intrigued by the elements that the author threw in at the end and I look forward to the next installment.