Noted misanthrope Michel Houellebecq is undoubtedly the living writer most qualified to write about noted misanthrope H.P. Lovecraft. Happily, Houellebecq happens to be a fan, and a zealous one at that. Curiously, the author of the disturbingly sex-saturated novels Platform and The Elementary Particles finds resonance in Lovecraft's resolute refusal to let sex, money, or morals infiltrate his terrifying, phantasmagorical worlds. Lovecraft's currency is fear, and his interest in the body is confined to dismemberment and grotesqueries.

Houellebecq's basic premise — that good horror writing (and good writing in general) is aligned against the world, against life — finds a perfect poster child in Lovecraft's biography. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a New England gentleman who eschewed the creep of modernity, a deeply and virulently racist xenophobe, and a frail, bookish creature enamored with faeries. Houellebecq reads the reclusive scribe's life as a series of negations of the friable world. Lovecraft's dreams and neuroses were sufficient for him. Indeed, the amoral evil of his imagination was infinitely more satisfying than any of his real-world haunts — such as the Lower East Side where he failed to find a job, or New England, where he returned to die.

Both Houellebecq and Lovecraft share a distaste for mankind. But while the former repudiates its own terms, the latter creates a parallel world, one of evil creatures and coincidence, which his prose cracks open like a geode. It is this world of Cthulhu and Yuggoth, with which readers have fallen in love. Yet it is Lovecraft's underlying abnegation of living that Houellebecq finds the most compelling. Compared to these proud misanthropes, Stephen King, who writes the introduction to the essay, comes across as a goof. Mr. King claims his inspiration comes "when Mr. Idea Man [speaks] up from his Barcalounger at the back of [his] head." One can almost feel Houellebecq and Lovecraft cringe. King traffics in "boo!" moments; Lovecraft unleashes fear, horror, and unspeakable terror onto this world, with which he feels neither kinship nor empathy.

-Joshua David Stein