Seventeenth-century surgeon Jean-François Charrière swore a childhood oath to live forever, an oath he might well fulfill. In his native France and beyond, encounters with age-old worshippers of Egyptian crocodile god Sobek bring him ever closer to securing immortality—but not without earning baleful Sobek’s everlasting wrath. Charrière’s divine nemesis pursues him from France, Egypt, India, and Quebec to present-day Providence, R.I. Can Charrière finally throw this monstrous deity off his trail, or will Sobek exact grisly vengeance?
This scintillating novel, based on a series of jottings made by H. P. Lovecraft in the 1930s, highlights Jonathan Thomas’s mastery of prose, shifting from the satirical to the gruesome; his deftness in portraying the multitude of characters whom the protagonist confronts; and his vivid depictions of the diverse locales where the action takes place. Lovecraft himself would be proud of the richness and dynamism of the novel that his scattered notes have generated.
Jonathan Thomas is the author of six short story collections, all published by Hippocampus Press, as well as an omnibus of his Lovecraftian stories, Malign Providence (2022). The Color over Occam (Hippocampus Press, 2024) has been called one of the finest neo-Lovecraftian novels ever written. Thomas lives and writes in Providence, R.I.
