This was a super-fast and engrossing read. I never could get into Lovecraft's stories, but I liked Victor Lavalle's Big Machine, so I figured I'd enjoy his take on Lovecraft's mythos. Even better: the story is packed with vivid description of Harlem during its Renaissance as well as its eldritch horrors, which are far more convincingly horrible than I recall from the source material. Plus, there is a gut-wrenching, take-no-prisoners callout to present day police violence, and I am here for it.

Do not judge this book by the free sample, if you go that route, because the story begins very comfortable and familiar with an ordinary girl who turns out to be secretly extraordinary. But then there's a battle a mere quarter of the way through, and then another, and then another, and the author does not pull punches on these scenes, which are rendered in cinematic detail and are all the scarier and higher stakes in contrast with scenes of beauty and wonder and the raw vulnerability of the heroine. I did not mean to read this book in three days but I couldn't do otherwise. 

Most of the time when I am praising books, I say "I couldn't put it down!" I did put this book down often, and read it very slowly, especially at the beginning: it is so dense with sensory detail and cultural hints about its fantasy realms that it's like every scene unfolds in slow motion. But this makes sense for the narrator, who travels the island pepper farm of his childhood to a decadent empire across the sea, and immerses himself completely in the experiences of being in the big city. I took little sips of this book for the first quarter of it, and then suddenly things picked up and hurtled toward some very unexpected conflicts. This is a book to buy in print, not on Kindle as I did; it's a book that revels in books, the highs and lows of giving oneself over to storytelling, and it would be comforting to read in a more tactile form.

I started this book on an airplane, which wasn't a good fit, because it's not the kind of book you can just immerse yourself in, or at least I couldn't. I finished it during jury duty, which was perfect, because it filled in the ticking minutes between panel selection and court prep and voir dire with fantastic creatures and gentle natural history. These are brief vignettes of encounters with animals that have taken a sharp turn on the evolutionary path. The stories are only loosely connected and arranged, so you have to power through on your own curiousity, but this is rewarded--especially in the last half of the book--with some lovely images.

Half of this book tells the story of Wilhelmina Upton, scion of a prominent upstate New York family which includes her hometown's founder and his son, a prominent novelist. The book opens when Willie returns to Templeton feeling disgraced, having fled her PhD research in the aftermath of a doomed affair. I could relate to some of her misfortunes, which--in addition to the escalating wackness of her circumstances and the incongruous touches of a house ghost and a town monster--kept me interested enough to finish this book. Besides, the other characters put an occasional check on Willie's more insufferable tendencies (such as her repeated moping that the whole world is going downhill).

But in order to get to the end, I had to speed through the other half of the book, composed of chapters from a dozen different character perspectives (and a couple in plural voice), all very badly executed. Like being subjected to a town history tour given by a third-rate impressionist. Seriously, there are cameos in the voices of a moustache-twirling French cad and a simpering spinster and a few "me no talk good" early American people of color and these are all completely terrible.

Three stars for Willie's story, barely two for the interspersed "historical" voices. You might like this book more if you're native to upstate New York or partial to James Fenimoore Cooper, whose real and imagined stories are the book's source material.