Marina Willett has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the 'old gent' lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears. The police say it's suicide. Marina, a psychiatrist, doesn't believe them. A tour de force of storytelling inspired by Lovecraft and his gang.

At the start of the session, a lot of us didn't understand the point of the book. It was about Lovecraft, but it wasn't Lovecraftian at all, and those of us who didn't know Lovecraft's work were confused about what that even meant. Melanie loved it, however, and made an argument that swayed about half the group to love it too -- it's a book about losers. She pointed out how self-important and jealous everyone in the book was, and how the knots of lies that the false Barrow tells create a trolling experience for the protagonist that is breathtaking in its pettiness. We agreed that the book was all about how different kinds of bitter and disappointed people act to destroy the worlds around them, and many of us left impressed by how powerfully La Farge captured that vision in both the historical fiction of Lovecraft fandom and the minor details of the disappearance of the protagonist's husband. Some of us still found the book a distasteful swamp of ambiguity and lies, but those Melanie convinced adored it as a study of the pathetic, with a powerful and almost tragic core of the lost Barrow at the center.