H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

Houellebecq Reads Lovecraft

Michel Houellebecq wrote H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life in 1991, years before he became one of France's most famous and controversial novelists. The book is nominally a literary study of H. P. Lovecraft, the American horror writer who died in poverty in 1937 and was posthumously recognized as one of the most influential genre writers of the twentieth century. But Houellebecq is not writing a standard critical study. He is using Lovecraft to work out his own obsessions: the hatred of modernity, the horror of the body, the refusal to participate in a world that has become intolerable.

Lovecraft as Mirror

Houellebecq takes Lovecraft's racism, his fear of cities, his cosmic pessimism, and his inability to function in ordinary social life not as biographical embarrassments but as the conditions that made his fiction possible. The argument is that Lovecraft's best work comes from a genuine revulsion toward modern existence, and that this revulsion, rather than being a flaw, is the engine of his literary power. The prose is sharp, personal, and recognizably Houellebecq. The Cernunnos hardcover edition includes illustrations and supplementary material.

About This Edition

Author: Michel Houellebecq
Publisher: Cernunnos
Format: Hardcover