THE DEEP ONES: "Tempting Providence" by Jonathan Thomas

"Tempting Providence" by Jonathan Thomas

Discussion begins June 30, 2021.

First published in Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (2010)



ONLINE VERSIONS

No online versions found to date.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1130946

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Black Wings of Cthulhu: Twenty-One New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

MISCELLANY

https://sherryaustin.livejournal.com/2364.html
https://tinyurl.com/4aunxar8

The first touchstone is to Black Wings #2, which is wrong - the story was first published in the first Black Wings anthology, as per the cover image and the 2nd touchstone.

(This caused me a bit of frustration as I've got #2 but not #1. I guess I ought rectify this omission.)

>2 AndreasJ: I have all this series. But I ended up buying duplicates on a couple because the cover illustrations were so similar my memory got confused on which ones I had. That's why have the LibraryThing app on my phone now.

>2 AndreasJ:

Fixed, I think.

I've got the first three Black Wings volumes. I'd favor Deep Ones nominations for stories in any of the six. If it were for a later volume, that would be an excuse to add it to my library. These are all previously-unpublished stories, from what I gather.

>5 paradoxosalpha: I think one of the last three has a reprint of a Kiernan story. Otherwise, they are all originals.

Ended up buying Black Wings. Even if I never read another story in it, the price for the e-book was fairly modest.

The "ghost" actually being a psychic lure was a pretty nice twist I thought.

I did wonder why the angler made the protagonist hungry. The time-frame seems much too short for meaningful fattening.

On the whole I liked this story, although there were some clinkers. Using "alum" as a plural bothered me, as did calling a mature academic bureaucrat a "yuppie."

>7 AndreasJ: The time-frame seems much too short for meaningful fattening.
Maybe? The time-frame might actually include the earlier sighting when Justin was a grad student. And--at least according to Justin's rationale--the culmination of the phenomenon might be well ahead of schedule. I was thinking of something different than "fattening" when I read it, though. More like the "psychic link" was creating energy exchange with the world in which the fisher lived, and this was overdriving Justin's metabolism.

I liked this story too, although for me it was at its most purely enjoyable to read when Justin confronted Palazzo, which suggests to me the story's a bit too long and we spend too much time inside Justin's head.

I say that on the assumption the authorial voice is supposed to be a kind of free indirect speech - in essence giving us Justin's perspective and inner thoughts at all times. But sometimes it seemed as if an omniscient author were practically sneering at Justin. Unless these were intended to be moments of self-deprecation in Justin's inner monologue that didn't work for me.

I appreciated being shown modern-day Providence for a couple of reasons. It appeals in the same way as the post-HPL Mythos stories that revisit Arkham and Miskatonic University in the '60s or later, and also because I listened the the season of the Crimetown podcast that covered Providence.

I thought there was a simpler explanation offered for Justin'd hunger - that the psychic link was making him feel the fisher's hunger.