The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

I really loved the first three parts of The Night Ocean. After that, the narrative became more bloated and meandering and harder to care about, although I always enjoyed the concept(s) it was working with.

If you like the work of H.P. Lovecraft, romantic tragedies about queer love, the history of science fiction and horror writing, unstable postmodern tales within tales, or works about the political landscape of 20th century America and Europe, The Night Ocean will certainly have something for you, although you’ll like it best if you like all of those things.

It had something for me in all of these elements, although I found the parts of the book involving Lovecraft to be more compelling than the rest. The main narrative framework, that of the psychologist and her maybe-dead husband, seemed to fade into insignificance in many ways.