I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is a genre-fiction writer, but this 2016 novel is not in the genre you might expect. It's a book about Lovecraftians rather than a book that is Lovecraftian. Nothing squamous or rugose shambles through the pages here; no one has a momentary vision of the depths of geological time and his place in the universe that sends him quavering into madness.

On the other hand, I'm not going to say the characters here are entirely sane to begin with.

I Am Providence is a murder mystery set at the Summer Tentacular, an annual horror convention devoted to H.P. Lovecraft and taking place in steamy August in (of course) Providence, Rhode Island. Anyone who knows Mamatas's online presence over the past two decades can guess that he does not have a positive and friendly opinion about those people and that scene and the whole concept of making Lovecraft central to a kind of literature or a fan lifestyle.

I am convinced that all, or maybe just most, of the characters in Providence are versions of real people in the horror/Lovecraftian world, though I was only tangentially connected there (and that fifteen years ago), so I'm not going to try to trace them. (OK, just one: Bhanushali is so obviously a gender-swapped S.T. Joshi that no one will miss that.)

Well, maybe one more, the central one: Panossian, the murder victim. He's dead on page one, and he narrates alternate chapters in first person, posthumously [1] - the even-numbered chapters are from a tight third-person POV on Colleen Danzig, a new writer coming to her first convention, expecting to room with Panossian and instead finding herself amateur-sleuthing her way around the BNFs. [2] Panossian is a gadfly, a deliberately annoying minor writer whose single novel, The Catcher in R'lyeh, is seemingly too clever by half (especially for the very traditionalist Lovecraftian crowd) and sank almost without a trace.

Panossian is Mamatas himself, slightly transmuted (Greek to Armenian, Move Under Ground to Catcher, etc.). That's the metafictional joke here: Mamatas is saying, somewhere between jokingly and honestly, "these people probably want to kill me for making novels like this and admitting Lovecraft was a massive racist, among other things."

Providence is not just a gigantic in-joke, but the in-jokiness is central. It rambles around the convention for three days, alternating between Panossian's newly-dead ruminations and Danzig's investigations, which ape the form of a play-fair mystery but end up more like a shaggy dog story. Frankly, there's no good reason for Danzig to care that much about Panossian's death, and spend all her time playing Nancy Drew - but that's the novel, so it's what she does.

It's OK as a mystery; it's killer as a stab in the back of Lovecraftians. "Is there a reason for a literate person to read century-old pulp fiction? For the most part, no, which is why most of it has been forgotten by all except obsessives and weirdoes." (p.3)

There are a lot of events in Providence; there's a lot of opportunity for Lovecratians to demonstrate the various ways they are obsessives and weirdoes; there's a lot of theorizing about the murder from various people. Mamatas is more or less in control of the plot, but there are several Signals from Fred, as when Danzig realizes, more than half-way through the book, that she's talked to several different uniformed cops but never even seen the detective running the case. That's the shaggy-dogness again; this is a book that rambles and wanders, to hit all of the scenes and ideas Mamatas had and to showcase all of these people in their (un)natural habitat.

I dog-eared a bunch of quotes while reading it: Mamatas is excellent at the cutting takedown, the epigrammatic attack. Here's some good ones:

• Hiram seemed harmless, but only in the way a heavily medicated inpatient at a lunatic asylum seemed harmless. (p.107) 
• Ranger was pretty important in Lovecraftian fandom, after all, since he had access to a photocopy machine and made his little 'zine, Dreamlands, with it sometimes. (p.189)
• Most people who are inexplicably confident despite being talentless and more than a little stupid have warm, affectionate parents. (p.232)

I didn't entirely believe in Colleen, the sleuth. I completely believed Panossian, the self-loathing dead loser. I somewhat recognized all of the other weirdoes and obsessives at the Tentacular. And I read Providence with some joy and multiple laughs and a lot of recognition. I think this book got a bad reception, because it's for that thin segment of fandom that both understands the jokes and can take them; fandom is famously humorless when it comes to itself. If you think you fit in that segment, check it out, but don't be surprised if you feel "attacked."

[1] To put in Panossian's own words, from p.4: "We dwell in darkness, anxious and panicked and alone without the benefit of senses or a future, and for who knows how long after death."

[2] Big Name Fans. Not entirely accurate: Lovecraftiana is a small, incestuous pool, and nearly everyone in it is a filthy pro, at least in their own heads. But Providence is a book all about in-group behavior and markers, so the term is appropriate.