SF Signal: New Book on H.P. Lovecraft

New Book on H.P. Lovecraft

The Guardian has an extract from a new book released recently, HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Actually, it's an English translation of a French essay by "controversially antiliberal French novelist", Michel Houellebecq.

Some interesting blurbs (or, if you prefer, extracts of the extract):

"I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes." [Lovecraft quote]

Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.

To create a great popular myth is to create a ritual that the reader awaits impatiently and to which he can return with mounting pleasure, seduced each time by a different repetition of terms, ever so imperceptibly altered to allow him to reach a new depth of experience.