A new novel about Lovecraft’s friend Robert Barlow, El Asesinato de Robert Barlow (The Assassination of Robert Barlow, 2022), by Veronica Evers and available now in Spanish. It appears to be a murder-mystery police-procedural novel, set in the 1950s or perhaps into the early 60s in Mexico. A Lovecraftian homage, apparently. My translation and digest of the blurb…

Some years after Robert Barlow’s death, the historian Galo finds an unknown manuscript. It is a prequel to “The Call of Cthulhu”. This, he thinks, contains hidden keys relating to Cthulhu. Simultaneously, there is another and related mysterious death. Detective Acosta will not leave the cases unsolved, and he uncovers a whirlwind of old stories and unknown parts of Barlow’s life. He even has talks with William Burroughs and other beatniks, and discovers that his crumbling old Mexico City harbours some very dark places…

I can’t find out much more about it, and the dates are a little uncertain (Burroughs was in Mexico City in the early 1950s for five years, I recall, and so the tale may stretch into the early 1960s if the detective is pursuing the trail some years later?). There’s a YouTube recording of the author at a literary festival, though that may just be a reading rather than a Q&A. YouTube can offer no transcript to translate.

Apparently the “old Mexico City” was very different from the “new Mexico City”, and the author tries to evoke the latter. So I assume a lot of vintage local colour is involved, and I’d guess the author is also a knowledgeable citizen of the city. Level of gay content, and the angle it take on that… unknown. But it’s not being tagged as a gay novel.

No sign that Lovecraft appears in the book as a character, though if I was writing such a novel I’d at least have a cameo. Perhaps via a letter between Barlow and Burroughs that recalled the Lovecraft he had known.

A new review by Arciapod of the graphic novel The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence (2022), albeit reviewed from one of those annoying highly-compressed…

free preliminary, and likely unedited copy of this book

…of the sort that gets sent out for a graphic-novel review.

But his review usefully reveals that…

One’s enjoyment of this book is directly proportional to how much somebody likes or knows about H.P. Lovecraft. … people familiar with his works will get a far better appreciation for this story than others, and honestly without knowing a bit about him, the finer points of this may fly right over their heads.

Sounds good. Warning: the review has some big spoilers. The Arciapod review has only just been published, but it turns out the book has actually been out since June 2022. I had noticed it in passing, but until now had not heard about the direct Lovecraft connection.

Now… a while back Tentaclii noted the similar-looking ‘A Bestiary of the Twilight’ (Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule, June 2022), a French ‘BD’ (i.e. oversized graphic novel, often in hardcover) also featuring Lovecraft as a character. The French Lovecraftians had mentioned it, and I assumed it had not yet been translated.

Yet I now see that this ‘BD’ has the same 120 page-count as Mr. Providence, and has the same Parisian artist/writer in Daria Schmitt. A little digging finds European comics sources noting the name change. Yes, Le Bestiaire du Crepuscule has been re-titled as The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence for the English edition, and since summer 2022 can now be enjoyed by English readers.

Only as an ebook, admittedly, but at a very reasonable price (probably around $5, for U.S. readers). If you want the dead-tree version it seems you’d have to get the French ‘BD’ and a phrasebook.

The news of this prompted me to see if there was an ebook of the graphic novel biography Some Notes on a Nonentity: The Life of H.P. Lovecraft. No, still just an out-of-print 2017 hardback.