I know the name of JP Behrens, because he's on the Books of Horror Go To List that I'm reviewing my way through, with his debut novel, 'Portrait of a Nuclear Family', but I haven't got to that one yet, so this is my first experience of his work. It's a slim volume, at seventy pages maybe counting as a long novelette rather than a short novella, but it gets agreeably creepy. Also, like the other novella I reviewed this month, Nathan Ballingrud's 'Crypt of the Moon Spider', it combines a few genres into what must surely count best as weird fiction. I love that this old fashioned genre is on the ascendant nowadays.

It starts out as hardboiled detective fiction, what many might think of visually as film noir. Travis Daniels is a private detective, working the streets of New York from his Buick roadster. He's very able, the first page showing him fulfil one mission, but he's down on his luck and owes money, just as hardboiled dicks tend to do. As soon as he gets back to his office with payment for that mission swelling his pocket, he's waylaid by thugs taking it to knock off his debt. Being beaten up is clearly routine in his business, as is avoiding that with the right move and he's neatly sardonic, whichever way it goes down. As you might expect from the title, this book is an investigation and he'll be the one hired to do it.

However, there's a Lovecraftian flavour right from the outset too. That first mission was to locate an antique idol, which he finds at a shop called Pickman's Papers for the mysterious Madam Bina who runs Keziah's Curiosities in the Red Hook neighbourhood of New York and clearly has myriad stories of her own to tell. I like Daniels, but he's an archetype there to do a particular job and the weirdness to come is going to happen around him as much as to him. He's our grounding, always a reminder of normality and reality whatever else goes down. Madam Bina, on the other hand, is a character not so restricted and I'd love to see more stories about her.

By the way, that's at least three names that Behrens borrowed from H. P. Lovecraft and employed in homage, namely the painter Richard Upton Pickman from 'Pickman's Model', the witch Keziah Mason in 'Dreams in the Witch House' and the title location in 'The Horror at Red Hook', a slum in Brooklyn. Daniels brings up a couple more while explaining his cover story to the current owner of the icon, a writer working on a book about strange sea myths, because he lumps the Vigilant and the Alert alongside the Flying Dutchman, both ships from 'The Call of Cthulhu'. Pay attention and you'll catch more as the book runs on. I wonder how many I missed.

Oh, and we're one chapter in thus far, merely six pages. This may be a slim volume indeed but it's doing a lot more than we might think, right from the outset, even before the skeletal Sir Edward Martin Mandeville hires Daniels to find his niece, Leslie Owens, who has gone missing. He doesn't care about her in the slightest, but he wants her parents to shut up about it, so throws Daniels a sizeable wad of cash to handle the matter, before leaving, providing only the girl's name and the location of her parents, the town of Bolton, Massachusetts, not far from Arkham.

While there are a lot of angles to enjoy here, especially for Lovecraft devotees who can play catch the reference (Bolton's mentioned in at least three of his stories), I'd call out the mood as the one that's nailed first and nailed best. Read without thought of genre, everything thus far has played out in a completely normal fashion, a regular man doing regular jobs. However, even readers who don't know Lovecraft from a hole in the wall can't fail to pick up on the fact that everything in the story is slightly off and that feeling only grows with the story until it simply can't be ignored.

It's like we find ourselves in a world created by AI where everything's almost real but never quite right, as if God created us in his image but wasn't quite sure at the time how many fingers he has. It's a specific nightmare, one in which everything unfolds ruthlessly according to human logic but we retain the abiding fear that we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto, and everything familiar could be whipped away in an instant, leaving us staring into the abyss of insanity, wondering where our connection to reality went. Of course, that's just about as Lovecraftian as it gets and the fact that Behrens gets this absolutely right is the book's biggest success.

It's there when Daniels searches for Madam Bina, only to find her right behind him, as if she was there all along. It's in her response when he asks her about the bloody bandages in her bin. It's in the sound Mandeville makes when he walks. It's in the illusion of his teeth. It's in the way that the background noise of the world at large vanishes when Mandeville's present. I've felt that myself, in Glastonbury Abbey, and it's a truly bizarre feeling, knowing that a busy road is six feet away on the other side of a wall but not being able to hear it, even though there's no roof and we were all in the open air. That's how this book reads: everyday life feels wrong somehow, because the rules changed and nobody told us.

While the most overt freakiness waits until much later, not least in what Daniels finds underneath Arkham Sanitarium, the creepiest moment for me is the detective's meeting with Leslie's parents. They're in a rundown house in Bolton, from whose walls all the pictures have been removed, and it doesn't take a detective to realise they're suffering, but, while they're clearly already grieving for a daughter they don't believe is dead, something else is going on here. They can't sleep, they can't eat and they can't leave. This is 'Exterminating Angel' territory but firmly rooted in cosmic horror rather than surreality.

Of course, the case takes him to Arkham, where we visit the locations we expected all along, even before we learned that Leslie is studying Anthropological Folklore at Miskatonic University, and was last seen at the Armitage Memorial Library there. Yes, Daniels absolutely finds his way to the Rare Books section and peruses the volumes we've been waiting to see, because that's de rigeur for any writer brave enough to venture into Lovecraft territory. I liked these scenes in the library, typically my favourite place in weird fiction; but Behrens conjures up a lot more of Arkham than that and I particularly liked how as much of the impact was in what we don't see as what we do.

You'll have to pick up a copy of 'Missing in Miskatonic' to find out how Daniels does with respect to finding Leslie Owens and what else he finds in, around and below the storied streets of Arkham. I feel relatively safe in suggesting that, if you've read Lovecraft, you'll be able to guess at some of what's to come, because Behrens mostly follows tradition. However, I'll happily emphasise that he is absolutely willing to take a left turn when we expect him to take a right, which I appreciated an awful lot. There's one particular angle that feels modern here, in a period story set in 1928, but it only feels modern because Lovecraft himself wouldn't have done it, for, well, reasons. It's entirely appropriate for the era and I have absolutely no problem with Behrens employing it.

I'm enjoying what I'm reading from Crystal Lake Publishing. They're doing very good work and the variety I'm seeing in their books is as admirable as their consistent quality. Now, let's see this not remain a standalone novella. It does carry a subtitle, "A Travis Daniels Investigation", which hints at this being a series, so I'm looking forward to diving into his next case. ~~ Hal C F Astell