R2| ARTS OTHEGLOBEANDMAIL | SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2019
E
si Edugyan has chosen Jac-
queline Baker’s novelThe
Broken Hoursas The Globe
and Mail Book Club’s next title.
Praised by the Washington
BlackandHalf-Blood Bluesauthor
as “deliciously creepy, heart-
breaking and beautiful,” Baker’s
Depression-era novel tells the sto-
ry 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 this 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 rivet-
ed. But it’s also a book about char-
acter. The deeper you get into it,
the more you question the narra-
tor 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 to-
ward 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 op-
pressive – in a wonderful way!”
Edmonton-based Baker is an
award-winning novelist from Sas-
katchewan’s Sand Hills region.
Her debut collection, A Hard
Witching and Other Stories,was
published in 2003 and was nomi-
nated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust
Fiction Prize.The Broken Hours,
her most recent novel, was pub-
lished in 2014.
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 Ed-
gar Allan Poe, but hit a roadblock:
She learned that Sylvester Stal-
lone had apparently been work-
ing 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 Rot-
ten 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 StephenKing and Guillermo del Toro,
Lovecraft pioneered a specific
kind of horror that emphasizes
cosmic mystery and psycholog-
ical 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 re-
searched 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,” Bak-
er said. “It was that very night that
I started to imagine the book – in
the very form it takes now.”
A prodigious writer, Lovecraft
produced at least 100,000 mis-
sives, so part of Baker’s research
involved reading – and rereading- his last bound volume of corre-
spondence. “Not only for infor-
mation, 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 [a] histor-
ical figure in fiction, you’re be-
holden 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. In-
stead, 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 un-
comfortable 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 atmo-
spherics and muscular writing al-
so had an impact on reviewers.
“Baker excels at taut, suggestive
dialogue and revels in the impli-
cations of absent women (Love-
craft’s mother and aunt; Arthor’s
own wife and daughter) and fickle
memories that, like ghosts ... can
only be glimpsed from the cor-
ners of the eyes,” said a Quill &
Quire review at the time. Publish-
ers Weekly observed that Baker
“writes with the conviction of a
fan, adeptly evoking the shadowy
melancholy of Lovecraft’s world
while always keeping the narra-
tive’s momentum moving.”
On Nov. 28, Baker will join Edu-
gyan onstage at Vancouver’s Per-
formance Works Theatre for the
second Globe and Mail Book Club
night, which is a subscriber-only
event in partnership with the
Vancouver Writers Festival.
Last spring, Margaret Atwood,
the Globe Book Club’s inaugural
host, choseThe White Bone, a nov-
el by Barbara Gowdy. The an-
nouncement was followed by an
event held in Toronto last May, co-
hosted by Atwood and The Globe.PleasesubscribetotheBooks
newslettertodaytokeepup-to-date
onthelatestsubscriber-exclusive
bookclubinstallments.Youcan
registerforourBooksnewsletterat
tgam.ca/newsletters.A‘deliciouslycreepy’readforthenextGlobeBookClub
JaquelineBakerwill
joinEsiEdugyanin
Vancouverfortheclub’s
nexteventonNov.28
CRAIG OFFMAN
Author Jacqueline Baker
initially set out to write a
novel about Edgar Allan
Poe, but ended up
instead creating a story
inspired by the life of H.P.
Lovecraft, which became
The Broken Hours.
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