As a “basic element of horror,” for example, he cites “Any mysterious and irresistible march toward a doom.”

Michel Houellebecq is a professionally controversial French novelist. I haven’t read any of his books – very few of them look appealing to me. But I came across this, and wondered why that guy, of all people, would write a very long essay about HP Lovecraft. And it’s actually really good.

By forcefully introducing the language and concepts of scientific sectors that seem to him to be the weirdest into his tales, he has exploded the casing of the horror story.

Because sometimes reading an author examining another author leads to a useful dissection of method and effect. And Houellebecq is great on Lovecraft’s approach and vision. I mean, that bit I just quoted? That defines the last hundred years of weird fiction in one line.

At no point does it edge away from the other side of Lovecraft’s reputation, and makes a fair case for his having had a second and more massive mental breakdown during his time in New York City, his normative-for-time-and-place casual racism exploding into xenophobic psychosis. The terrifying, unhinged language he uses in his letters during that period is clearly recognisable as the language used upon his return to Providence and his commencement of his central works.

Racial hatred provokes in Lovecraft the trancelike poetic state in which he outdoes himself by the mad rhythmic pulse of cursed sentences; this is the source of the hideous and cataclysmic light that illuminates his final works.

(Also worth noting is that Houellebecq himself has been up before the beak on charges of inciting racial hatred, and in recent times even the current head of the French National Front have called his public statements on race and culture “excessive.”)

“Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness; then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnameable architecture of time”.

And yet, this outsider art has become part of mainstream culture. Houellebecq is good on why it appeals, and how it works. If you’re interested in Lovecraft, weird fiction, or perhaps even just fiction, I think it’s well worth the couple of hours it takes to read. I actually found myself slowing down while reading it, turning its big ideas around in my mind to see all their facets.

Here’s the best bit for me: I didn’t know until I read this book that Lovecraft kept a commonplace book where he listed story ideas, and that it’s been preserved and transcribed.

Caveat: the translator’s notes at the end are full of comments like this:

In the French edition, Houellebecq quotes at length from a first-person account by Lovecraft of his delight on seeing the New York skyline for the first time. However, neither (Lovecraft scholar ST) Joshi nor I were able to find any evidence of this quotation in Lovecraft’s writings.

It is possible that Houellebecq is a Lovecraftian mad narrator himself.

HP LOVECRAFT: AGAINST THE WORLD, AGAINST LIFE (UK) (US+)

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