After the End of the World
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4.2 • 27 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
After the End of the World by Jonathan L. Howard brings the H.P. Lovecraft mythos into the twenty-first century.
The Unfolded World is a bitter and unfriendly place for Daniel Carter and Emily Lovecraft. In this world, the Cold War never happened because the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1941. In this world the Nazi Großdeutschland is the premier superpower, and is not merely tolerated but indulged because, in this world, the Holocaust happened behind the ruins of the Iron Curtain and consumed only Bolsheviks, Communists, and others the West was glad to see gone. In this world, there are monsters, and not all of them are human.
But even in the Unfolded World, there are still bills to pay and jobs to do. Carter finds himself working for the German secret security service to uncover the truth behind a major scientific joint project that is going suspiciously well. The trail takes Lovecraft and him to a distant, abandoned island, and a conspiracy that threatens everything. To fight it, Lovecraft must walk a perilously narrow path between forbidden knowledge and soul-destroying insanity.
Fortunately, she also has a shotgun.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Howard's richly complex sequel to Carter & Lovecraft featuring bookseller Emily Lovecraft and detective Daniel Carter begins with a 1941 nuclear explosion over Moscow, engineered by the Nazis. That blast catapulted the world into an "Unfolded" alternate reality in which Germany won a different World War II. In Unfolded 2017, the Nazis still dominate much of the world. Daniel and Emily both cling to their memories of the Folded World (aka our reality). When Daniel is hired to investigate an experiment in high-energy physics being conducted by a mostly German research team at Miskatonic University in Arkham, he brings in Emily, and the two eventually follow the project to an Aleutian Islands outpost, where they become entangled in a byzantine web of espionage and counter-espionage linked to the earthshaking events of 1941. Howard doesn't shy away from touchy topics: Emily is the African-American descendant of racist white horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, and the book has plenty of subtle and unsubtle references to modern politics ("Making Germany great again") and 21st-century Nazism. This is an entertaining and meticulously crafted mix of speculative history, suspense, sardonic humor, and cosmic horror.
