Gerhard’s Reviews > The Night Ocean > Status Update

“You can be my Virgil in the underworld of the tortilla,” he said. Why does everyone want me to be their Virgil? Barlow didn’t say. Why can’t I be Dante, for once?

...I had a view of College Hill, lit by the afternoon sun. For one long moment, I saw the city the way Howard always had, as a dream-city, where the colonial past curled like a cat, sleeping in a doorway, which might wake up at any moment, stretch, and come back to life.

H. P. Lovecraft was a homosexual. There were no female characters in his stories—or almost none! His creatures had long, slimy tentacles! Also, Lovecraft frequently used the words nameless and unspeakable: What was that, if not a sly reference to the love that dared not speak its name?

When Lovecraft moved to the city, he and Long became inseparable; they ate together, argued politics, shopped for books, took long walks at night—and all the while, the Erotonomicon revealed, Lovecraft longed for Long.

But this isn’t the story of our marriage. It’s not the story of how quickly Charlie moved in with me and stood Han Solo and Darth Vader on my bookshelf, in front of D. W. Winnicott and George Eliot.