Mr. Cannyharme: A Novel of Lovecraftian Terror

A retelling of a Lovecraftian story, I struggled somewhat with this one. This novel was written early in Michael Shea's career, but has only recently been released. The typical Lovecraftian elements are there, with a strange sense of unreality to a lot of the storytelling, but I found the pacing really dragged on this. The gritty setting of a run down hotel in San Francisco in the late 70s was captured well, but the time setting this all up dragged horribly. When adding to the general ambiguity of the tale this made this a bit of a struggle to get through. There is no doubt that Michael Shea is a good writer. The quality of the prose is evident in this very early work of his, but the story craft and structure was still a work in progress.