Puck

review by Brian Charles Clark

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
by Michale Houellebecq
Publisher: McSweeny’s, 2005

 

French bad-boy novelist Michel Houellebecq (pronounced well-beck) is famous for his Platform and Elementary Particles, books stuffed with depressing, depressed and amoral characters who love to sexually humiliate each other. Houellebecq has been accused of writing misogynistic narratives, but you’d have to have tunnel vision to see them that way: Houellebecq doesn’t just hate women, he hates the entire human race. Houellebecq is, in other words, an misanthropic existentialist’s dream date.

Houellebecq’s dream date, in turn, is H.P. Lovecraft. If Houellebecq is the international star of a new wave of illiberal misanthropism, Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) is the pater familias of that wave. Continue Reading »