Onyx reviews: I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 8/10/2016

After Susie Salmon is murdered, her ghost narrates The Lovely Bones from a heaven of her own creation, where she's able to see the effects of the crime on those she knew and loved. Author Panossian, a man of Armenian descent whose only published book is a mash-up between the works of H. P. Lovecraft and J. D. Salinger, is less fortunate after he is killed.

Naturally, he's surprised to discover that he still has a consciousness post-mortem. He can hear things going on around him but he has no supernatural insight into the goings-on that ensue. He can no longer see, he speculates, because his murderer stripped the skin from his face—including his eyelids—and his brain has shut down visual input due to the overload.

His world in the afterlife, such as it is, is limited to the morgue where his mutilated body rests and gradually decays, except when it's being dragged out of the drawer so that yet another suspect in his murder can be confronted with it. Panossian gleans a few details about what's going on, but the heavy lifting is done by his former roommate, Colleen Danzig.

The two are in Providence for the Summer Tentacular, an annual convention where all things H. P. Lovecraft are discussed, dissected, belabored and analyzed to death. Many of the attendees are writers—or wannabe writers—or other artists who have been strongly influenced by Lovecraft's weird works. Panossian was a regular attendee, but this is Colleen's first experience with the Tentacular, so she becomes the fresh eyes through which this event is described.

She's an engaging, colorful (she dyed her hair green for the weekend) and energetic avatar. Though she barely knew Panossian and their relationship was strictly platonic, she feels compelled to investigate his murder, especially when it seems that her fellow convention attendees aren't terribly bothered by his death and the police aren't taking certain facts seriously. The main thing that Colleen knows is that Ponossian was in possession of a book called Arkham that was bound in human flesh, which he was attempting to sell so that he could pay his bills. That book is missing after his murder, and Colleen knows that there are any number of avid collectors at the convention who would covet such a volume.

I Am Providence gives Mamatas the opportunity to explore Lovecraft from every angle. Everyone at the Tentacular has an opinion or a pet theory about the author and his work, some of them sound and some beyond the fringe, and they all find a voice here. No conclusions are drawn, but the reader is left with plenty to consider about the man's troubled legacy.

There's a strong temptation to regard the novel as a roman à clef. Mamatas knows his way around genre conventions and his depiction of Panossian's more confrontational behaviors might be interpreted as autobiographical. Who, then, are all these other characters meant to represent? Does it really matter? Anyone who has ever attended a convention of this sort will recognize certain types of people and behavior, even if it isn't possible to attach specific names to all the characters. An insider in that world might make some astute guesses, but the book's success doesn't rely on that aspect. It might have been nice to see a few more sympathetic and likeable characters in the mix, but Panossian's quirky obnoxiousness tends to bring out the worst in people.

Of particular note, Mamatas—via Colleen—shines a spotlight on some of the less attractive aspects of conventions; in particular, the way women are treated. Men with minimal social skills make her feel uncomfortable or violated in the close quarters of party suites, taking huge liberties, and she (and other female attendees) often have to struggle to make their voices heard over the strident lecturing of the domineering men during panel discussions.

All of this insider detail aside, I Am Providence works well as a straight whodunit. This isn't Lovecraft pastiche: the only tentacles are those worn by the attendees or illustrating book covers and pages. Colleen plays Nancy Drew, digging around for clues, dragging details out of recalcitrant cops and potential witnesses, going boldly where no one else seems interested in going. It doesn't seem likely that the police would have the authority to hold an entire hotel's worth of people on the premises for a couple of days, but that's a minor procedural quibble.

A second death ups the stakes, but even then the police seem at a loss to figure out if the two crimes are connected and who might be behind them. Colleen gets her Agatha Christie moment when she theorizes about how things might have happened in front of a captive audience, but she's missing a couple of crucial facts. Mamatas plays fair with the clues, though, and an astute reader might pick up on a couple of things that Colleen doesn't learn until the very end—or at least recognize them in retrospect.