Jonathan Thomas’s Tempting Providence and Other Stories is a 2010 story collection which I don’t think I was aware until now. But on reading the blurbs, the title story certainly appeals.

Apparently the story “Tempting Providence” is the best of what the Publishers Weekly called an “uneven” bunch. Amazon reviewers appear to concur about the unevenness. Although I see many glowing nuggets of praise plucked from magazine reviews, and that Thomas is in the “Elite” of recent writers according to Joshi’s new book 21st-Century Horror: Weird Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. So he seems worth a look.

In the well-regarded title story, it is said, the wistful ghost of H. P. Lovecraft returns to modern Providence. He finds that a herd of real-life horrors have been allowed to run rampant across his beloved city. He lyrically compares the dehumanised modern city to the old Providence he knew so well. What a fine idea for a story. Thomas is a native of Providence, and thus the topographic and architectural details must be presumed to be accurate to a level that only a local could attain.

I’d definitely like to read this story at some point, and there’s a £5 ebook. Though no audiobook, or a 99 cent audio reading of just that story. I see that it’s the third story in the book, so I can’t get it free just by weaselling the free 10% ebook sample from Amazon.

But my finances dictate that the book is one for my WishList at present, since I recently had to spend £130 to replace an old computer monitor than died. Nice to see a big version of the book’s cover, though, simply in terms of a tasty bit of Providencial Lovecraftian art presented within an adequate design framework (though I would have improved the use of type, such as by reducing the huge gap between the words ‘Tempting’ and ‘Providence’). Self-publishing is drifting into a dangerous disregard for the needs of book cover design and typography, in my view, though this fine cover from Hippocampus shows how appealing a cover can be to potential readers. I doubt I’d have stumbled on the book, in image search, if it hadn’t been for seeing a thumbnail image of the cover. The cover is your primary initial marketing hook, and it should not be neglected just because Amazon often chooses to annoyingly whisk the reader to the start of the body text when they first open a purchased ebook.

The cover art is by Thomas S. Brown, who I’m pleased to discover is both British and on DeviantArt with a fine big Gallery that I had never seen before (despite much regular burrowing into DA for Digital Art Live magazine). Brown’s Gallery has a delightfully Lovecrafty version of the famous ‘death of Chatterton’ paintings…

There’s also a darker ‘age stained’ version of the picture, something that perhaps reflects the fact the the original also exists in several versions. I saw the original of the Birmingham version of the ‘death of Chatterton’ many years ago, up close and at leisure. I hazily recall that it was unexpectedly small, but also magnificently detailed.