With an introduction by Stephen King.
"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."
In this prescient work, Michel Houellebecq, the author of the novels Platform and Elementary Particles, focuses his considerable analytical skills on H.P. Lovecraft, the seminal, enigmatic horror writer of the early 20th century. Houellebecq's insights into the craft of writing illuminate both Lovecraft and Houellebecq's own work. The two are kindred spirits, sharing a uniquely dark worldview. But even as he outlines Lovecraft's rejection of this loathsome world, it is Houellebecq's adulation for the author that drives this work and makes it a love song, infusing the writing with an energy and passion not seen in Houellebecq's novels to date. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in Lovecraft, Houellebecq, or the past and future of horror.
"Michel Houellebecq's essay H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is a remarkable blending of critical insight, fierce partisanship, and sympathetic biography--a kind of scholarly love letter, maybe even the world's first truly cerebral mash note. The question is whether or not the subject rates such a rich and unexpected burst of creativity in what is ordinarily a dull-as-ditchwater, footnote-riddled field of work. Does this long-dead, pulp-magazine Johnson deserve such a Boswell? Houellebecq argues that H.P. Lovecraft does, that he matters a great deal even in the twenty-first century. As it happens, I think he could not be more right."
-Stephen King, from the Introduction
"Against the World, Against Life is the lightly disguised manifesto of a wildly ambitious, wildly iconoclastic, and just plain wild young writer."
-John Banville, Bookforum
