It was H.P. Lovecraft, you know, who wrote the phrase “the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” By that, Lovecraft meant that putting together seemingly-unrelated facts, human beings could discover undreamable wells of horror.

But, that was Lovecraft, and his business was horror. Naturally, he looked at everything from the horrorist’s perspective. Can correlating dissociated facts have other uses too? Well, let’s put a pin in that for now. (Either a pushpin or a grenade pin; your choice.) For now, we must get to the work at hand: reviewing The Thing From HR by Roy M. Griffis.

If you’re like me, when you see “HR”, you probably think “Human Resources.” But in this case, it means “Human Restraint.” The narrator of our story, Narg, is a shoggoth who works in benighted vistas beyond time. If you have read Lovecraft, you know what that is. If you have not read Lovecraft, just know that shoggoths are scary tentacled monsters.

And yet “Human Restraint” and “Human Resources” are not so different after all. As Narg explains, his work involves lots of tedious paperwork, office politics, and all the other things we associate with bureaucratic offices. The fact that his department deals with human souls is incidental; the annoyances of clerical life are, it seems, truly universal.

And then Narg is sent to do some field work among the humans. His consciousness is installed in the form of a Professor Weisenheimer, a newly-arrived faculty member at an American college. To guide him among the humans, the upper management has also provided him with a human guide also existing in the same body. A good idea in theory, but like so many bureaucratic operations, it is administratively bungled, and the human consciousness that guides Narg is that of a surfer dude named Murphy, or “Murph.”

Together, the two extremely different minds are forced to guide the vessel of Professor Weisenheimer among the humans. In addition to trying to discover why Narg has been given this assignment (again, like so many organizations, the memos are not clear!), they are soon drawn into a conspiracy among the college faculty involving stolen uranium, communist spies, and of course, eldritch blasphemies and horrifying rituals. This is a Lovecraftian story, remember.

And yet… it’s also profoundly anti-Lovecraftian at the same time. A fittingly-Schrödingerian duality. (And yes, this book does include a cat named Schrödinger.) Not only is it a comedy, which is not a word often used in connection with the gloomy old prophet of Providence, but it is ultimately about very human concerns and concepts; the things that make life worth living. Sentimentality, in other words, which is a concept almost entirely absent from the Cthulhu mythos.

I recently watched the film Living, starring Bill Nighy, which is a remake of an Akira Kurosawa film Ikiru. Both films are about a government clerk who, on receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, is forced to confront the question of how he wants to spend his remaining time on Earth. Ultimately, what he discovers is that he wants to spend doing a modest bit of good in the world. Both versions are extremely beautiful films, and I highly recommend them.

But why am I bringing this up? What can a pair of slice-of-life drama movies possibly have to do with this Lovecraftian horror comedy? Well, this is where that bit about correlating contents from earlier comes in: because despite differences in setting, tone, genre, etc. The Thing From HR has basically the same theme: that what’s important in life is helping out as best you can. Even if you’re just a lowly bureaucrat in some department nobody cares about, you still may have a chance to, in some small way, make the world better. And you should have the courage to do it, even if it means going against standard practice and talking directly to the big boss.

Now, of course The Thing From HR is largely a bawdy, irreverent, horror-comedy, with all that entails. Lovecraft purists might object to that; but I would guess most readers will find it hilarious. Particularly enjoyable are all the exchanges between Narg and Murph trying to understand Earth slang. And by at least one metric, it’s the most suspenseful book I’ve ever read: for the first time ever, I actually skipped ahead a little to see if one character would be okay. (The answer, as it turned out, was ambiguous.)

If you like Lovecraft, but also don’t mind affectionate parodies of his oeuvre, then I highly recommend this book. Even if you’re not a fan of Yog-Sothothery, though, this one will likely be a hit. It’s got plenty of horror, but also plenty of humor, and plenty of heart.