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Esi Edugyan has chosen Jacqueline Baker’s novel The Broken Hours as The Globe and Mail Book Club’s next title.
Praised by the Washington Black and Half-Blood Blues author as "deliciously creepy, heartbreaking and beautiful,” Baker’s Depression-era novel tells the story of Arthor Crandle, a lonely man on the run from his family who becomes a personal assistant to H.P. Lovecraft. At this stage of his life, the influential horror writer is living in a decrepit New England home menaced by creaky sounds, macabre artifacts and spectral women – and Crandle is on a quest to find out what makes the house so ghoulish.
“I thought his was a book that would appeal to readers right across the board,” said Edugyan, a two-time Giller Prize winner who also will co-host the next Book Club event later this month in Vancouver. “For those who like plots, this has it in spades. This book is so taut – you’re just riveted. But it’s also a book about character. The deeper you get into it, the more you question the narrator and his motives.”
Edugyan said she first got hooked in an early scene when Crandle’s umbrella turns inside out as he’s walking in the rain toward his prospective employer’s home in Providence, R.I. “I felt this creeping horror that things weren’t as they seem,” she said, finding herself intrigued by the sorrowful narrator who had left behind a great deal. “It was oppressive – in a wonderful way!”
Globe Book Club: Learn more about Esi Edugyan’s selection and how to participate
Edmonton-based Baker is an award-winning novelist from Saskatchewan’s Sand Hills region. Her debut collection, A Hard Witching and Other Stories, was published in 2003 and was nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Broken Hours, her most recent novel, was published in 2014.
Based in Edmonton, Jacqueline Baker hails from Saskatchewan’s Sand Hills region. The Broken Hours, her most recent novel, was published in 2014.Amber Bracken
Currently on leave from MacEwan University, where she is a professor of creative writing, Baker is working on her next piece of fiction, or as she put it, "Trying to think my way into the new one.”
When Baker was thinking her way into her previous novel, she initially set out to write about Edgar Allan Poe, but hit a roadblock: She learned that Sylvester Stallone had apparently been working on a Poe biopic for decades, in which he would ultimately cast himself in the lead role. Baker worried about a possible overlap between a serious novel and film that go could straight into the Rotten Tomato compost heap.
Instead, she pivoted.
At a subsequent brainstorming session with a couple of friends, H.P. Lovecraft was floated as a possible alternative. An influence on creators as diverse as Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro, Lovecraft pioneered a specific kind of horror that emphasizes cosmic mystery and psychological fragility over guts and gore. Also a notorious reactionary and proponent of white supremacy, he died in obscurity and poverty in 1937.
Once Baker went home and researched Lovecraft, the novel sprung to life almost right away. “What I found was several novels waiting to be written – his life was so rich, tragic and complex," Baker said. “It was that very night that I started to imagine the book – in the very form it takes now.”
A prolific writer, Lovecraft produced at least 100,000 missives, so part of Baker’s research involved reading – and rereading – his last bound volume of correspondence. “Not only for information, but for the flavour of his voice and core of his character,” she said.
Baker said that she wrestled with including Lovecraft’s odious political views, which were not unusual for the time – and in the end, she mostly left them out. “It was tricky – his politics are not to be admired,” she said. “I think that when you recreate historical figure in fiction, you’re beholden to stick to who they were – not to update them for modern sensibilities or vilify them. I didn’t want to make that my agenda. Instead, I wanted to make him the person he was.”
Another part of her mission was trying to understand just how Lovecraft became so tormented and reactionary. “That’s what we do as writers anyway: walk around in shoes other than our own," she said. "The more uncomfortable those shoes are, the greater the challenge.”
While Baker succeeded in bring Lovecraft back to life (in suitably spectral form), the tension in the novel between elliptical atmospherics and muscular writing also had an impact on reviewers. “Baker excels at taut, suggestive dialogue and revels in the implications of absent women (Lovecraft’s mother and aunt; Arthor’s own wife and daughter) and fickle memories that, like ghosts … can only be glimpsed from the corners of the eyes,” said a Quill & Quire review at the time. Publishers Weekly observed that Baker “writes with the conviction of a fan, adeptly evoking the shadowy melancholy of Lovecraft’s world while always keeping the narrative’s momentum moving.”
On Nov. 28, Baker will join Edugyan onstage at Vancouver’s Performance Works Theatre for the second Globe and Mail Book Club night, which is a subscriber-only event in partnership with the Vancouver Writers Fest.
Last spring, Margaret Atwood, the Globe Book Club’s inaugural host, chose The White Bone, a novel by Barbara Gowdy. The announcement was followed by an event held in Toronto last May, co-hosted by Atwood and The Globe.
Please subscribe to the Books newsletter today to keep up-to-date on the latest subscriber-exclusive book club installments. And to attend the Vancouver event on Nov. 28 where Esi Edugyan and Jacqueline Baker will discuss The Broken Hours, register here. The event is complimentary and open exclusively to subscribers.