Last time, I discussed the mainstreaming of H. P. Lovecraft, and since then the pace has only picked up. Tales (Library of America, $35.00) made the cover of Bookforum, the book pages of the Village Voice, and was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Daniel Handler, better known to children as Lemony Snicket. Like Laura Miller in Salon.com, he performs the trick of reading and mocking the earliest of the stories on the chronologically arranged collection. However, he wasn't giggling on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 when in San Francisco he took the job of putting the cherry on the mainstream cake by taking part in a celebration of the English translation of Michel Houellebecq's H. P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life, (Believer Books, $18.00) an extended essay on Houellebecq's childhood literary hero. The job of giggling was mine.

As SF fans don't get out much, I imagine I should explain that Believer Books is an imprint Dave Eggers' McSweeney's empire, which publishes McSweeney's, a literary magazine, in both online and print versions; The Believer magazine, which is about literature but doesn't contain any; and which runs a pirate supply store in San Francisco and a superhero supply store in Brooklyn (both front non-profit writing workshops and literacy tutoring for kids). Houellebecq is an aging enfant terrible whose books Whatever and The Elementary Particles are shocking to the easily shocked, as they express the sort of practiced "controversial" illiberal opinions that only people who don't read are supposed to hold. He also made a bit of a legal and political ruckus in France by calling Islam the "stupidest of all religions." In his younger days, the controversialist wrote an essay on Lovecraft which was, until Believer Books stepped in, only available via Robin Mackay's private translation (which is still free online).

So on May 25th I went to hear Handler interview Houellebecq at Foreign Cinema, a restaurant/art space/independent movie theater. I was aware of a ludicrous call for a protest against the author, but nobody made it out to form a picket line, so I went right in. Needless to say, the smattering of t-shirts amidst the ocean of horn-rimmed glasses, little black dresses, and knicker slacks (really!) let me know all I needed about the event. I didn't even need to hear the fellow walking in behind me ask where the "event" was by one of Foreign Cinema's employees. "The Lovecraft event?" the waiter asked. "The Houellebecq event!" the patron insisted. Handler's first question wasn't to Houellebecq, but to the audience: "How many people here are familiar with the work of H. P. Lovecraft?"

About 15% of the audience raised their hands.

Handler and Houellebecq spent an hour or so dancing around one another; Handler punted on the question of Lovecraft's racism, calling it only "unprogressive", and he didn't dare suggest any connection between it and Houellebecq's own tired controversy mongering on the issue, though racism is a central theme of Against The World, Against Life. Handler said that the young men who find Lovecraft so compelling are "loners" who are soothed by stories of lone men discovering the horrors of the universe. Houellebecq suggested that they're just "nerds" and "geeks", after comically struggling for the English words.

The only interesting opinion Handler allowed himself was the thought that one has to read Lovecraft for the humor value of his ludicrously baroque sentences. Houellebecq countered, explaining that Lovecraft was a "writer's writer," and a literary "extremist", obsessive/compulsive who wrote without regard for taste. And there's a bravery in that as well. He also pointed out, smartly, that Lovecraft was actually quite competent at reportage - he used faux letters, newspaper articles, journal entries, police reports-and well-rendered dialect dialogue from fishermen, old Vermont hill people, and tired metropoles, all to lead to the reader toward the inexorable conclusions of his stories. Unlike Handler's own endless beating of a single archaic tone and voice in his A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lovecraft's polyphonic montage is not a cheap trick.

Handler also didn't get Lovecraft's interest in fascination - he drew a dubious link between the Lovecraftian hero exploring the universe to destruction and the bikini girls in slasher flicks who go swimming immediately after the first killing. Houllebecq recalled scientists who, before the days of university funding and insurance, would poison themselves deliberately as part of their experiments, just to know the truth. The Lovecraftian hero is driven by curiosity (scientific, historical, aesthetic) and is so hungry for it to be satisfied that nothing can stop him…except the knowledge he's after.

After an hour of this, I didn't think anyone in the crowd was really getting any smarter. Most of them were just there to gawk at Houellebecq, and he could have been discussing his cabbage recipes for all they cared. Handler's questions, which boiled down to "Aren't all the things you say in your little book ridiculous?" hardly impressed. At the end of the Q&A session, we broke for milling around and equally unimpressive second-tier wines provided by the French Consulate. Yep, that's right: Houellebecq is so dangerous and controversial in his home country that the diplomatic pouch signed the checks and made the public appearance possible.

Houellebecq's little book, however, does impress. Houellebecq has referred to the essay as a short novel, with Lovecraft as both its protagonist and object. He doesn't linger over the quotidian details of Lovecraft's biography as other critics, pinned as they are between the author's voluminous correspondence and slim bibliography, often do. Instead, Houellebecq cuts to heart of Lovecraft's major works. They're fueled by his paranoiac and masochistic racism on the one hand, and also limned with his disdain for the civilized world of grown-ups and its twin prime movers, sex and money, on the other. Any college sophomore can point the racism in Lovecraft's writing, but relatively few people have noticed that masochistic, defeatist, posturing that fills the stories and the total impotence for living that informed them. Against The World, Against Life also includes "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Whisperer in Darkness", two great proofs of Houellebecq's theses and a counterfactual to the repeated claims that Lovecraft is all adverbs and tentacles with nothing else to offer.

Of course, we can hardly expect anyone to read it. Buy it, yes. Read it, no. It's hard to flip the pages when you're clutching a free glass of crap wine in one hand, and your Nextel camera phone in the other. How better to show that you got tipsy in the same room as a Real! Live! Author! No wonder Lovecraft was against life. Please kill me.

Article © 2005 Nick Mamatas All other content © 2005 Jeremiah Tolbert