For fans of legendary pulp author H. P. Lovecraft, there is nothing bigger than the annual Providence-based convention the Summer Tentacular. Horror writer Colleen Danzig doesn’t know what to expect when she arrives, but is unsettled to find that among the hobnobbing between scholars and literary critics are a group of real freaks: book collectors looking for volumes bound in human skin, and true believers claiming the power to summon the Elder God Cthulhu, one of their idol’s most horrific fictional creations, before the weekend is out.
Colleen’s trip spirals into a nightmare when her roommate for the weekend, an obnoxious novelist known as Panossian, turns up dead, his face neatly removed. What’s more unsettling is that, in the aftermath of the murder, there is little concern among the convention goers. The Summer Tentacular continues uninterrupted, except by a few bumbling police.
Everyone at the convention is a possible suspect, but only Colleen seems to show any interest in solving the murder. So she delves deep into the darkness, where occult truths have been lurking since the beginning of time. A darkness where Panossian is waiting, spending a lot of time thinking about Colleen, narrating a new Lovecraftian tale that could very well spell her doom.
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Ahead of Ian McEwan's literary nasty Nutshell, a fable of infidelity readers will only be able to experience from the perspective of a foetus, I Am Providence proffers a murder mystery narrated in no small part by the victim of that very vicious killing in the moments before his failing brain cracks and crumbles like "a sponge drying in the sun." (p.162)
Panos Panossian is an utterly insufferable author of Lovecraftian lore, so it's either fitting or simply suspicious that he meets his maker on the first day of the annual Summer Tentacular. "Providence's premiere literary conference about pulp-writer, racist, and weirdo Howard Phillips Lovecraft" (p.1) features, funnily enough, "a veritable 'Who's That?' of horror fiction," (p.30) including one Colleen Danzig. A newcomer to mythos mania with just a few short stories to her name, she was set to share a room with Panossian, but when the con goes on despite his death, Colleen decides to determine just whodunnit. After all, "if anything is possible, then yes, an untrained writer could find a murderer." (p.173)
Not just a murderer, but a mutilator too, because to add insult to injury, the killer, whoever he or she may be, purloined poor Panossian's face in addition to his future...
Singularly sickening as the murder this mystery revolves around is, if the truth be told, there's no shortage of suspects in Nick Mamatas' scathing portrayal of Lovecraftian fandom:
Panos Panossian is an utterly insufferable author of Lovecraftian lore, so it's either fitting or simply suspicious that he meets his maker on the first day of the annual Summer Tentacular. "Providence's premiere literary conference about pulp-writer, racist, and weirdo Howard Phillips Lovecraft" (p.1) features, funnily enough, "a veritable 'Who's That?' of horror fiction," (p.30) including one Colleen Danzig. A newcomer to mythos mania with just a few short stories to her name, she was set to share a room with Panossian, but when the con goes on despite his death, Colleen decides to determine just whodunnit. After all, "if anything is possible, then yes, an untrained writer could find a murderer." (p.173)
Not just a murderer, but a mutilator too, because to add insult to injury, the killer, whoever he or she may be, purloined poor Panossian's face in addition to his future...
Singularly sickening as the murder this mystery revolves around is, if the truth be told, there's no shortage of suspects in Nick Mamatas' scathing portrayal of Lovecraftian fandom:
The Tentacular was a strangely aggressive environment—writers jockeying for position, people bellowing at one another, men sneering at women out of some abject simultaneous attraction and repulsion. It was high school all over again, except that all the kids with a measure of social intelligence were at the homecoming dance and the kids left behind were the meatheads, glue-sniffers, nerds, and minor league bullies. Geeks who liked to show off their knowledge of esoteric subjects, the more repulsive, the better. (p.74)That last—"the more repulsive, the better"—may well have been Mamatas' mantra whilst working on I Am Providence, because it is, if not a horrid novel, then a novel of horridness. Almost all of its characters are creeps, not least Colleen, who is so cavalier and careless in her pursuit of the truth that she points the finger at pretty much everyone she meets, such that it's no wonder she hasn't made a great many friends by the end.