Published in the USA in 2019 by CERNUNNOS An imprint of Dargaud 57 rue Gaston Tessier 75019 Paris www.cernunnospublishing.com
© Cernunnos/Dargaud 2018
First published in France by Editions du Rocher, as H.P. Lovecraft. Contre le monde, contre la vie.
© Editions du Rocher, 1991, 1999, 2005
© Stephen King for the introduction
Cernunnos logo design: Mark Ryden
Cover illustrations: Ying-Ju Lu
Cover design: Benjamin Brard
Composition: Le vent se lève
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ISBN: 9782374950846
eISBN: 978-1-68335-974-6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
“LOVECRAFT’S PILLOW” AN INTRODUCTION by STEPHEN KING
CHRONOLOGY
H.P. LOVECRAFT: AGAINST THE WORLD, AGAINST LIFE by MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
PREFACE
PART ONE: ANOTHER UNIVERSE
PART TWO: TECHNICAL ASSAULT
PART THREE: HOLOCAUST
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
H.P. LOVECRAFT
INTRODUCTION
“Lovecraft’s Pillow”
by STEPHEN KING
Michel Houellebecq’s longish 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.
Have you ever scared yourself?
Here’s a question every writer whose work has touched upon the weird, the supernatural, or the macabre has been asked, not once but many times. I am sure that H. P Lovecraft faced the query, and that he replied with his customary gravity and politesse no matter how many times he heard it. Certainly he would never have answered as did one writer at a World Horror Convention I attended some years ago, with another question: Have I ever taken a piss?
Vulgar, that, but otherwise not a bad response. Because any writer who has worked this field of literature more than occasionally has scared him or herself. Men who’ve spent their lives in coal mines cough. Guitarists have calluses on the tips of their fingers. Deskmen and women often walk with a pronounced stoop by the time they reach middle age. These are occupational hazards. For the horror writer, the occasional scare when the imagination performs especially well is another. It comes with the territory, and most of us who work that territory consider a passing frisson no more interesting than the coal miner considers his cough, or the guitarist the tough spots on the ends of her fingers.
There is, however, a related question. Ask a group of writers who have specialized in tales of horror and the supernatural if they’ve ever had an idea too scary even to write about, and their eyes will light up. Then you’re no longer talking about occupational hazards, which is boring; then you’re talking shop, which is never boring.
I’ve had at least one such idea. It came to me while I was attending my first World Fantasy Convention, in the dim and antique year of 1979. That WorldCon happened to be held in Providence, HPL’s hometown. While wandering aimlessly about on Saturday afternoon (and wondering, of course, if Lovecraft had once wandered the same streets), I happened to pass a pawnshop. The window was crowded with the usual bright assortment of goods: electric guitars, clock radios, straight razors, saxophones, rings, pendants, and guns-guns-guns.
While I was looking in at all this rickrack, Mr. Idea Man spoke up from his Barcalounger at the back of my head, as he sometimes does, and for reasons no writer seems to fully understand.1 Mr. Idea Man said, “What if there was a pillow in that window? Just an ordinary old pillow in a slightly dirty cotton slip? And suppose somebody curious about why such an item would be on display—a writer like you, maybe—went in and asked about it, and the guy who ran the pawnshop said it was H. P. Lovecraft’s pillow, the one he slept on every night, the one he dreamed his fantastic dreams on,2 maybe even the one he died on.”
Reader, I cannot remember—even now, a quarter-century later—ever having an idea that gave me such a chill. Lovecraft’s pillow! The one that cradled his narrow head when he left consciousness behind! And “Lovecraft’s Pillow” would, of course, be the title of my story. I hurried back to my hotel fully intending to skip everything else I had planned, two panel discussions and a dinner, in order to write it. By the time I arrived, a great many details about that pillow had come clear in my mind. I could see the slightly yellowish cast of the cloth; I could see a ghostly, brownish ring that might have been a tiny leakage of spittle from the corner of the thin-lipped, sleeping mouth; I could see a dot of darker brown that was surely blood which had slipped from one nostril.
And I could hear the low squeal of the dreams trapped inside. Yes indeed. The chittering of H. P. Lovecraft’s nightmares.
If I had started the story right away, as I’d planned, I’m almost sure it would have been written, but as I was walking down the twelfth-floor corridor to my room, some hilarious soul popped out of another room, slapped a beer in my hand, and pulled me into a group of happy, promiscuously talking writers. Then came the panel discussions (after all), and the dinner (naturally), followed by a great deal more drinking (of course) and talking (to be sure). Not a little of the talk was about HPL, and I participated gladly, but I never did write that story.
Later that night, in bed, my mind turned to it again, and what had seemed marvelous in the afternoon light became awful to think about in the dark. It was thinking of his stories, you see—the ones that had been in that narrow head, horrors separated from the pillow by only the thinnest shield of bone. The best of them—what Michel Houellebecq calls “the great texts”—are uniquely terrible in all of American literature, and survive with all their power intact. Lovecraft’s only stylistic rival at mid-twentieth century, ironically enough, may have been the noir writer David Goodis, whose language was entirely different, but who shared Lovecraft’s inability to ever stop, to say enough is enough, but had that neurotic need to simply keep drilling away at the column of reality. Goodis, however, has fallen into obscurity. Lovecraft never did. And why not? I think because, unlike Goodis, the shrill pitch of HPL’s compulsion was balanced by a kind of lumbering poetry and an unearthly range of imaginative vision. His screams of horror are lucid.
And was I, I wondered as I lay sleepless upon my own pillow, actually going to try and put all that into a story? The idea was ludicrous. To try and fail would be miserable. To try and succeed would require an expenditure of psychic energy—not to mention simple nerve—far beyond what any short story (save perhaps one by Gogol… or Lovecraft himself) deserved. And the idea of trying to maintain such a gruesome conceit for the duration of a novel, even a short one, was too daunting for serious consideration. I felt like a would-be diver on the cliffs at Acapulco, who probably would have been all right if he’d just gone ahead and jumped after a cursory look to make sure he was on the right side of the rocks. Instead, I paused too long to consider the drop and the possible consequences. Thus was I lost.
“Lovecraft’s Pillow” wasn’t written that weekend in Providence, and has never been written since. If you would like to try your hand a
t it, Reader, I bequeath it to you… not to mention the bad dreams that are sure to follow any serious effort to do such a thing justice. As for myself, I no longer want to go inside Lovecraft’s pillow, to visit whatever dreams may remain caught there, and I have an idea that’s a point of view with which Michel Houellebecq could sympathize.
In his very unacademic passion, Houellebecq makes assertions which will cause controversy and start arguments. I dispute some of them myself. Is life painful and disappointing? The former may be true, but only at times; the latter may be true, but only for some people. Is it useless to write new realistic novels? About two thousand pages of prose over the last fourteen years suggests that Tom Wolfe, at least, would beg to differ. Does humanity inspire only attenuated curiosity in us? Ah, my dear Houellebecq! Each day I meet at least sixty people and long to follow forty of them home in order to see what they do there.
There are other assertions, perhaps the most controversial having to do with Lovecraft’s supposed disinterest in sex and dismissal of Freud,3 but we must pass them by without extended discussion—if this introduction runs too long, it will overwhelm the book that follows! Besides, Houellebecq’s argument that Lovecraft was one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, while not beyond debate, becomes less dismissible with every passing decade that his books remain in print and his works become more widely taught in the literature courses of America and the world beyond. And Lovecraft’s literary importance may be secondary to the fact—attested to by the very passion of Michel Houellebecq’s essay—that HPL continues to remain not just popular with generation after generation of maturing readers but viscerally important to an imaginative core group that goes on to write that generation’s fantasy and weird tales… and, by so doing, to chart that generation’s deepest fears. I’m no fan of sociological analysis when it comes to literature, but I think that a generation’s weird fiction, which has always been mainstream literature’s first cousin (and sometimes its twin sister), gives us valuable information about the society in which it appears. If you show us what terrified a generation (the nightmares inside the national pillow, if you like), then nine times out of ten a great many other decisions that were made during the time that fiction was being published—legal, moral, economic, even military—come into perfect focus.
But put all that psychological and sociological business aside. It’s mostly twaddle, make-work for spies in the house of literature, those chickenshit academics (their number grows yearly) who will grasp at any straw to keep from talking about story and language and imagination—the sweet DNA of fiction—because it makes them uncomfortable, leaves them with the all-too-real possibility of a fifty-minute class where they have almost no lecture notes and so the real horrors loom: dead air and staring student eyes.
Whatever bones to pick I may have with some of Michel Houellebecq’s conclusions and assumptions, I never once doubted his central thesis: that Lovecraft’s works stand against the world and against life. As both a reader of weird fiction and as one who has written my share, I understood at once that Houellebecq had written something I’d long felt but had never been able to express—that weird fiction, fiction of horror and the supernatural, utters a resounding “NO!” to the world as it is and reality as the world insists it must be. And (Houellebecq doesn’t state this in so many words, but his very admiration of Lovecraft proclaims it, shouts it from the rooftops) the greater the imagination and the stronger the connection between writer and reader, the more emphatic and persuasive that “NO!” becomes. Houellebecq expresses the technique necessary to achieve such an adamant shout in piecemeal subheads, and it will perhaps not hurt his overall purpose to assemble them here:
“Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness; then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnameable architecture of time”.
For the would-be writer of weird fiction, it is indispensable advice.4 For the reader approaching Lovecraft for the first time, it—and Houellebecq’s essay, in which it is embedded—is a useful touchstone, a way of understanding how Lovecraft proceeded. As to how Lovecraft succeeded—that is a mystery no book, essay, or university seminar will ever unravel. That is between each reader and the Lovecraft he or she discovers, the one who opens each reader’s imagination with those long, drilling passages that seem to scream… and then to become a voice that whispers late at night, when sleep won’t come and the moon peers coldly in the window.
The voice whispering from inside the pillow.
A portion of young readers in each generation comes to Lovecraft without prompting or guidance, just as a portion of each generation comes to Agatha Christie… and Stoker’s Dracula… and will, I suspect, come to the Harry Potter books for years or even centuries to come. What sets Lovecraft apart and makes him worthy of this fiery, fiercely partisan essay isn’t so much literary merit—oh, such a slippery term—as his brute staying power. Unlike Christie or Stoker or Rowling today, Lovecraft was never a bestselling writer.5 He wrote in obscurity (by hand), was paid a pittance, and died in genteel poverty. Yet, as Houellebecq points out, “[When] Lovecraft died, his work was born.” Since then, that work, with Houellebecq’s correctly named “great texts” always at the center, has never been out of print, and the books have generated millions and millions of dollars of income.6
Yet the financial legacy of Lovecraft work is of little concern to Houellebecq and need be of little concern to us. The creative legacy, however, should concern us greatly. Houellebecq mentions two writers Lovecraft influenced—Frank Belknap Long and Robert Bloch. There are dozens more, beginning with the Texas prodigy Robert E. Howard, whose stories of Conan the Barbarian are in many cases barely disguised Lovecraft pastiches and gave birth to an entire genre; and perhaps ending with Joyce Carol Oates, who has spoken highly of Lovecraft and acknowledged his influence on at least some of her more gothic works. Between Howard and Oates (and it is difficult for me to imagine a literary gulf much wider) is an entire pantheon of writers who have been touched by Lovecraft and his dreams, sometimes directly, sometimes at second hand (in discovering Robert Bloch at the age of ten, for example, I was inadvertently discovering Lovecraft), sometimes forcefully, sometimes with the barest brush of one outstretched wing of imagination. Such a list of writers would include Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Jonathan Kellerman, Peter Straub, Charles Willeford, Poppy Z. Brite, James Crumley, John D. MacDonald, Michael Chabon, Ramsey Campbell, Kingsley Amis, Neil Gaiman, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams. This is just where the list starts, mind you.
Nor are these necessarily the important people. For most developing readers, there comes a dangerous “dead spot” between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It’s that time when most young people put down the books of their childhood but before they pick up those of adulthood. As we know, many children never bridge that gap; when they become adults and we go into their homes, we will be apt to find Reader’s Digest, the National Enquirer, Jokes for the John, and not much else. Some children during that passage of years put down Nancy Drew and R. L. Stine in favor of Agatha Christie, Dean Koontz, perhaps Stoker’s Dracula. They are the ones who will stock their future homes with the current bestsellers of the moment and continue to provide Danielle Steel’s retirement portfolio with fresh stocks.
But there is a third group—always a third group—who cannot be satisfied with such pale fare, who feel a need for something more… dangerous. Yes. Even if it speaks to them from inside the pillow late at night, when the moon peering in the window looks like a skull rather than some romantic image out of a pop song. Yes, even so. And I think it’s this third group that has kept Lovecraft alive long after his death, and—irony of ironies—in spite of his own adamant stand against life.
All literature, but especially literature of the weird and the fantastic, is a cave
where both readers and writers hide from life. (Which is exactly why so many parents and teachers, spotting a teenager with a collection of stories by Lovecraft, Bloch, or Clark Ashton Smith, are apt to cry, “Why are you reading that useless junk?”) It is in just such caves—such places of refuge—that we lick our wounds and prepare for the next battle out in the real world. Our need for such places never subsides, as any reader of escapist literature will tell you, but they are especially valuable for the potentially serious reader—and writer—who is going through those vulnerable years when the evolution from the child’s imagination to the more sophisticated and organized adult’s imagination is happening. When, in short, the creative imagination is molting.7
Understand me here. I must leave you in Michel Houellebecq’s capable hands, and I would be understood before I go. I am not saying that Lovecraft (or Leiber, or Ashton Smith, or even myself) was an immature writer, best understood by immature minds who can easily discard him once the storms of adolescence have subsided. That’s a canard as old as the early, dismissive critiques of Poe. They did poor service to him, and would do poorer service still to Lovecraft, whose “great texts” remain landmarks of imaginative achievement and reward the reader of fifty as richly as the bright child of fifteen. My point (my final point, you may be grateful to note) is that Lovecraft’s mature achievements have never been more splendidly validated than they are by Michel Houellebecq. If you’ve read all of Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life may tempt you back to him, and cause you to see him in a new light; if you are coming to the Dark Prince of Providence for the first time, you could not have a more invigorating and exciting opener of the way.
And—to quote Robert Bloch—pleasant dreams.
Stephen King
Bangor, Maine
December 10, 2004
1. I have said, on one occasion or another, that the “I have an idea for a story” moment comes when very common things are perceived in an entirely new way, or in some new configuration. That usually shuts people up because it sounds plausible. It is plausible, and it is part of the “I have an idea” moment, but there’s more to it. I just can’t explain what the more is, even after all these years. I can say that it sometimes feels like being shot in the brain.
H. P. Lovecraft Page 1
