Customer Reviews

The H.P. Lovecraft Institute

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This was an interesting story, little to do with HPL, but interesting none the less. The humor comes in as you read along and start playing continuity police. Misspellings, characters switching in mid conversation, a magic car that can't decide if its a Lincoln, a Dodge or a Plymouth, etc... Once I stopped being upset at the quality of the editing and got into the game, I started counting/writing down the mistakes from pg 116 on and hit 39 "oopses". This book is a prime example of "proof reading by spellcheck". So the question becomes Did Wildside Press fire all their proof readers before printing this book? If you get distracted by continuity errors, try another of Bischoffs books. If it doesnt bother you, this at least has interesting characters and a plot line with potential.

I read this book in a desultory fashion while on a cross country drive. Here follow my impressions.The HP Lovecraft Institute is by David Bischoff who is apparently widely published, although I've never read anything by him. He has written several other novels with similar titles like JRR Tolkein University. This book is a publication from Wildside Press, an Alan Rogers book (so I guess he was the editor?), with a publication date of 2002. List price is $34.95, no discounts noted. I forget how long ago I got my copy, or how much I paid for it. I can't figure out who did the cover art, a sort of picture of HPL in an octopus like body, rather drab. Page count was 386. Physically it is a handsome book but the editing was remarkably poor. Typos abounded, with misspellings, word subsitutions and characters changing names in mid page. This reflects the fact that the editor should have demanded a few more rewrites.

I'll be brief and will not describe the plot in detail. This may spoil it somewhat for those who care. Basically this is a case where an evil sorcerer type has used an arcane power source to prolong his life. By means of blood sacrifice, now that the stars are right, he intends to open a gate to allow Nyarlathotep access to our plane. Sounds very Lovecraftian. Didn't read that way. This novel was fraught with problems. In fact the genre seems much more suited to the short story, although recently I did enjoy Balak and the work of Cody Goodfellow. HPL Institute read more like a Stephen King wannabe than an HPL knock off. This sorcerer type has killed his brother years before, and enslaved his niece, making her a vampire (not very mythos). Of course there is a disillusioned minister with a son who has nascent telepathy and telekinesis powers, an oversexed teen girl, and the brother has been resurrected somehow as a skeleton named Mr. Bones who communicates with an innocent young girl, making his home in her closet....I could go on. Stock King situations and characters, unscary gore verging on the schlocky, unsexy sex verging on softcore porn, paper thin charcters who do not relate to one another in a believable way (particularly when the son catches the dad in hanky panky with a high school girl he has some interest in), weak dialogue, a confused jumble of subgenres, less than compelling prose. Well I liked a few of the brief vignettes but mostly this was forgettable. No sense at all of the cosmicism of HPL which I really like. I also need to mention that HPL made an appearance as someone the sorcerer type told all to, and who then wrote up this truth as fiction and who was then offed by the sorcerer. I really dislike this plot device, where HPL is mentioned as having written fiction that was actually true.

With everything else I guess the most unforgivable fault for me was that it was boring. I kept looking wistfully at other books in my stack, but forced myself to finish based on the price paid. If the prose had sparkle I still could have recommended this book. As it was, at the price, I suggest borrowing it from the library instead of paying cash if you really want to read it. You miss nothing if you give it a miss. I certainly was relieved to be done with it. On the other hand it was much better than stuff like Horror Between the Sheets.