H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
Earlier this year, a quasi-amateur "pulp" writer vaulted into the national literary canon when the Library of America publishedH. P. Lovecraft: Tales. Now McSweeney's Believer Books makes available in English a perspicacious essay on the reclusive horror-fictionist by a controversially antiliberal French novelist. Houellebecq finds Lovecraft's significance in his rejection of human importance. A thoroughgoing materialist, Lovecraft based the horror in his stories on the perception that humanity was doomed to extinction well before the end of the cosmos. The monstrous, implacable, arational Old Ones--Cthulhu and the rest--that Lovecraft repeatedly depicts as eventually invading and destroying human civilization are simply the imaginative expression of a deeply pessimistic cosmic fatalism that Lovecraft's own stunted life seemingly endorsed. Lovecraft was against life and the world because science and rationality told him they were meaningless and ephemeral. Yet what inspirationally disturbing and vivid fiction Lovecraft's beliefs animated. Without his example, would the fiction of Stephen King, who contributes an argumentative introduction here, and such superb movie shockers asAlienever have existed?Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved