Don’t you just hate it when all you want is to study dead languages alone in your office, but you’ve just discovered a dangerous cult that is trying to resurrect the dead and take over the world, and it’s up to you and a handsome detective to stop them? Percival Endicott Whyborne is a particularly reluctant hero in Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk, which came out back in 2012. This first book in Hawk’s lengthy Whyborne & Griffin series is a subversive take on Lovecraft’s cosmic horror mythos that centers a love story between two men. I adore it when writers take the world that H. P. Lovecraft created and use it to create stories that would leave the notoriously bigoted author turning in his grave.
Though a son of one of the most powerful families in the New England town of Widdershins, Whyborne has no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps. In fact, Whyborne was essentially cut off from the family when he made the baffling decision to study philology at Miskatonic University and get a job doing obscure research for the Ladysmith Museum. But all that knowledge of dead languages is suddenly coming in handy when a handsome detective needs Whyborne’s help deciphering a cryptic notebook left behind by a murdered man. Griffin Flaherty is a former Pinkerton who has gone up against dark magic before … and lost. He can’t afford to lose again when the stakes are so high, but luckily this time he has a partner smart enough to beat the occultists at their own games. Together, Whyborne and Griffin uncover the dark underbelly of Widdershins and discover a mutual passion that brings them far outside of their comfort zones.
The romance subplot is really the driving force of this story, and watching Whyborne and Griffin fall in love just melted my heart. Both characters are struggling with some pretty serious trauma. When we first meet Whyborne, he shuns relationships of all types—pushing people away and suppressing any part of himself that yearns for human connection. Awareness of the world’s homophobia and the constant humiliation by bullies both play a role in this, but at the heart of it is guilt around the death of his childhood friend and first love, Leander. Whyborne blames himself—and more specifically, his love—for Leander’s death, which leads him to believe that his love can only cause pain and tragedy. Until Griffin teaches him that it can also lead to joy and pleasure. Meanwhile, Griffin is a compassionate take on Lovecraft’s typical insanity trope. His past encounters with the occult have scarred his mind, manifesting as fits and night terrors. And this inability to trust his own thoughts and perceptions can make him cold and calculating around others, as well. Both men must learn how to be trusting and vulnerable again, even while reliving and confronting their traumas.
But being trusting and vulnerable is particularly hard when the world you live in is suddenly revealed to be full of terrifying dark magic. And I do mean terrifying. Despite its many references to the world that Lovecraft created, Widdershins is not at all derivative, and the horrors that haunt its pages are just as genuinely scary as they are unique. Take, for example, the Guardians—the undead henchmen of the Brotherhood that Whyborne and Griffin frequently find themselves fighting. Given that the Brotherhood has built their knowledge of the occult on stolen artifacts from the museum’s Egyptian exhibit, it is gruesomely poetic that the Guardians resemble bastardized versions of Egyptian gods. Pieced together from dead humans and animals, they tend to be humanoid hybrids with animal traits. But unlike portrayals in Egyptian art, they aren’t merely human bodies with animal heads on top. Instead, the reader is treated to detailed descriptions of how human flesh and bone have been warped into unnatural shapes, twisting the familiar into the unfamiliar and leaving these creatures deep in the uncanny valley. Sometimes I find that cosmic horror can get a bit too abstract to really be scary. But Jordan L. Hawk knows how to root that horror in tangible details that will make your skin crawl.
Interested in hopping on the Whyborne & Griffin bandwagon? You can buy Widdershins online and support The Gothic Library and independent bookstores in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. And once you finish that one, there are ten more books in the series so far! Be sure to come back and let me know what you think in the comments.