After the End of the World

Starred review from October 16, 2017
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. Agent: Melissa Chinchillo, Fletcher & Company.

Starred review from November 15, 2017
It's not often one sees the reboot of a series that's only one book old. But the second Carter and Lovecraft novel, following Carter & Lovecraft (2015), reboots the heck out of the series. We're now in an alternate timeline, one in which the Soviet Union went out of existence in 1941, Germany became the world's greatest superpower, and the Cold War was a minor political skirmish. Daniel Carter is still a cop in Providence, Rhode Island, only Providence is called Arkham now, and Emily Lovecraftwhose great-great-uncle was the horror writer H. P. Lovecraftstill runs a bookstore. But Daniel, who (like Emily) can remember the original timeline, is now working with German intelligence to investigate a scientific research project whose results are perhaps too good. And Emily? Well, she's just found a book in her bookstore that shouldn't exist anywhere except within the works of ol' H. P. himself. The book is The Necronomicon, a terrible and powerful magical text, and it might hold the key to this new world Daniel and Emily are living in and where they find themselves battling a conspiracy of genuinely epic proportions. This is a wonderful novel, ambitious on many levels and thoroughly successful. Its central characters are even more compelling than they were in their first appearance (here there's an added fish-out-of-water element), and the story is diabolically clever and convoluted. As readers wait for the next installment, they will ask themselves where Howard will take Daniel and Emily next.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)