La Farge loves intertextuality, nonexistent but real-seeming books, famous people lifted from the historical record and plausibly altered, the whole Borgesian shebang. But he also has another side, one intrigued by the dull stuff of contemporary life, by ordinary relationships, especially of the failed kind ... There won’t necessarily be a clear resolution to this mystery — or to any of the other mysteries the novel poses — but then, resolution is precisely what this story seeks to frustrate. And the book’s five narrators (Marina, Charlie, Barlow, Spinks and Lovecraft) combine to tell a beauty of a tale. The Night Ocean is a book full of pleasures. Though La Farge’s prose is as postmodernly fervid as Lovecraft’s is nostalgically formal, echoes of the horror writer’s work abound ... The Night Ocean contains in its particulars a number of allusions to the Lovecraft story that gives it its name. La Farge is a capable mimic, capturing everything from the talk of prewar science fiction fanboys to the language of modern internet trolls. And he (I’m assuming it’s La Farge) has even put up a website that purports to sell the reissued Erotonomicon. Dashing, playful and cleverly imagined, The Night Ocean emerges as an inexhaustible shaggy monster, part literary parody, part case study of the slipperiness of narrative and the seduction of a good story.

...a booby-trapped doozy of a book that’s as challenging and confounding as one of the many-tentacled alien beings in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos ... The result is a novel composed of narratives and counternarratives, texts and subtexts. It is both homage to and a sendup of Lovecraft and the 19th-century Gothic fantasies that inspired him. The layering is dizzying. Within Marina’s account lies Charlie’s account of Barlow’s retelling of his relationship with Lovecraft. Within Charlie’s story there are further sources: diaries, letters, recordings, transcripts — some of them red herrings and hoaxes and others seemingly true. La Farge, who adorns his book with cameos from William S. Burroughs, Isaac Asimov , Edward R. Murrow and others, carries it all off with breathtaking skill and panache ... As entertaining as the novel is, its complex structure results almost inevitably in the lack of a true center ... My advice is to spare yourself the trouble of trying to divine what’s true and what’s fiction in The Night Ocean and just go along for the ride.

Paul La Farge's intricately constructed novel about an apocryphal Lovecraft text, explores this passion binding us to stories and storytellers ... By freely mixing historical facts and fictional incidents, La Farge establishes an ever-shifting narrative ground, urging the reader to consider the tricky boundaries between the real and the imaginary ... At times the intensity of the reader-writer relationship—one that enlivens nearly every page of The Night Ocean—slackens due to the ever-compounding plot complexities. Digressions and narrative feints, slyly instructive though they be, sometimes enervate the characters' emotional charge ... With The Night Ocean, La Farge continues to press adventurously into the complicated moral terrain around the making of art and the provisional nature of truth. His sure-handed world-building around these ideas and the empathy that undergirds that vision suggest a circle of La Fargeans will someday soon emerge.

The Night Ocean would appall its inspiration, and that’s one of the many reasons you should read it ... Enjoying The Night Ocean requires no prior knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft, but readers who know their sff and their fan history will find in Paul La Farge a kindred spirit ... For a novel about H.P. Lovecraft, The Night Ocean is surprisingly moving; for a story about the recondite back alleys of science fiction, it is surprisingly accessible; for a historical fiction, it is surprisingly contemporary; and for a novel about the unknowable and the mysterious, it is remarkably satisfying. The Night Ocean deserves the highest praise.

Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean, about an elusive chapter in the life of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, is just such a tale. In La Farge’s hands, revelation becomes hoax, suicide becomes 'pseuicide' and, in an ever-expanding series of narrative curveballs, gay becomes straight becomes gay again ...with its stories within stories, each contradicting the next, is like a Russian nesting doll on steroids. All of its characters are tantalizing presences on the page despite, or maybe because of, the uncertainties that plague them ... At the heart of the book is the enigma of Lovecraft, a 'problematic person' who, while presenting the image of New England propriety, was also the worst kind of bigot ... Its dazzling intricacies add up to a heady masterpiece.

The Night Ocean has no center. No single character dominates the story, and no one event serves as a foundation for all others. The plot unfolds like a series of Russian nesting dolls, and thrillingly so: Like the best of Lovecraft, this novel questions the capacity of language to describe reality with accuracy ... more than a great read—it’s a timely meditation on the challenge of separating artist from art and the limits of human understanding.

Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean is a book about the terror of fiction ... But La Farge also ruefully interrogates the dangers of that fun, and the book’s winding layers of story-upon-story eventually locate, within the fabulist’s trade itself, a novel twist on uncanny horror ... It is roughly a detective novel, and happily free of any version of Lovecraft’s own iconic creations. This separates it from a rather pathetic subgenre of work that waves a lot of tentacles around and calls it 'homage,' but La Farge does do some slightly more high-minded fan service ...the core achievement is darkly sublime, a translation of the cosmic insanity of Lovecraft’s work back into the human realm ...clearly aware that by blurring the lines of Lovecraft’s sexuality and personality, he is treating a real man’s legacy as an instrument ...The Night Ocean’s final message, at least in part, may be more nihilistic than anything Lovecraft ever penned.

...with the many modern authors riffing on him, the Lovecraft well has nearly gone dry, but to stretch this metaphor there may still be a little water at the bottom. La Farge has clearly done his research, and it shows. The novel takes place over a century and jumps all over the east coast of the United States. It covers everything from fandom high and low to anthropology and complex questions about morality. It even manages to weave in such historical cameos as Isaac Asimov and William S. Burroughs, yet doesn’t feel pandering in the process. The research and air of authenticity is so impressive as to leave me wondering where the reality ends and fiction begins. But most importantly, it’s entertaining. Marina’s perspective is meticulous and insightful, and the inclusion of letters, annotated journals, old Lovecraft entries and even pictures lends the whole endeavor an air of verisimilitude. This is an impressive feat, and it makes me want to see what else La Farge has to offer.