Imagine the love-child of Calvin & Hobbes and The Addams Family (the original cartoons, not the TV series or subsequent movies).

Now picture that love-child applied to an imaginative version of H.P. Lovecraft's childhood. Young Lovecraft by Jose Oliver and Bartolo Torres does not pretend to be in any way biographical; in fact, Oliver makes it clear in his introduction that truth has nothing to do with this book.

So, let's pretend that the child Lovecraft was already steeped in the lore of elder gods that dominated his writing in his adult years. Mix the youthful hijinks of Calvin with the macabre humor of Addams, and you'll get something like this.

This book is at times repetitive, and it's not quite as funny as it seems to think it is. Still, it's cute and amusing, if not as successful as, for instance, Roman Dirge's Lenore series. All in all, good fun.