Providence Blue: A Fantasy Quest (Novel)

At his typewriter in little Cross Plains, Texas, Robert E. Howard created big characters—Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, Conan the Barbarian—who shaped the art of fantasy fiction for generations. But Howard would never know it. On June 11, 1936, at the age of thirty, brilliant and healthy, he shot himself outside his country home. Why would he do it, and where could death have taken him?

Providence Blue imagines the strange underworld journey of Howard after his suicide, though Texas mud, ancient Egyptian desert, and New England city gutters. Meanwhile, as his girlfriend, Novalyne, investigates what caused the tragedy, she finds herself led north to Providence, Rhode Island, home of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, where she makes a terrifying, life-changing discovery.

Decades later, penniless grad student Joseph Bonaventure in Providence is running out of air as he hobbles through a dissertation on Lovecraft. But after he meets a young librarian, Fay, they chance upon some of the author’s lost papers—a breakthrough in research that, however, locks the two of them in a web of black magic, occult conspiracy, and dark cosmic forces, tying them intimately to the fate, and salvation, of Robert E. Howard. With the help of local Jesuit priest Jim Cypriano, a graffiti artist named Tagger, a stray Chihuahua, and a whole cast of Providence characters, Joseph and Fay join a supernatural quest for good against evil, heaven against hell, the Lamb of God against the horrors of oblivion.