This book is a queer feminist retelling featuring two of Lovecraft's female characters and giving them a much more interesting storyline. It should be right up my alley, but unfortunately it wasn't.
My first issue was that I somehow missed that this was based on Lovecraft's work. Since I am not super familiar with his lore and pretty much only know it from a variety of Call of Cuthulu games and the podcast Malevolent I spent quite some time confused what the exact world building was about (I guessed it once Arkham was brought up and I googled the women, which helped). Once I realized it was Lovecraft inspired I did feel a bit stupid since it does mentioned "the Outer Gods" on the cover (which should have been a sign tbh), but realizing that earlier might have made my experience a more enjoyable one. I also feel like the retelling aspects will be a struggle for people who have never engaged in anything lovecraftian as it is not really explained in the text itself. My second issue with the text is that the first half of it was a slog to get through. It is written in an epistolary manner, switches between perspectives and rarely names the characters except for in the beginning of the chapters, which made it incredibly hard to follow the story in the beginning. I found myself having to backtrack a lot for the first 30% just to make sure I'm connecting the right stories. Plus the writing style is a bit over the top flowery for me at points, which also made it hard to follow the story and it does not vary between perspectives. I think sticking to just one perspective might have improved my reading experience a lot.
However, once the transformation started and I managed to get into the flow of the story and the writing and knew the two characters well enough to see which plotline we were currently following, I devoured this part with great pleasure. It is scary, it is gothic, the horror is cosmic and it's about healing from trauma and learning to trust and allow yourself to love. Touching and fucked up in the best of ways. I definitely think that if you can handle flowery and ornate prose better than I can and if you know a bit more about lovecraft, you will enjoy this even more than I did.

TW (also provided in the book): past incestous sexual abuse between father and daughter (the act is described once, but not in a lot of detail), past rape (again, not a lot of detail, but it is described), past traumatic pregnancy, body horror, emetophobia, body dysmorphia, ableism towards people with albinism, mentions of suicide ideation.