Part biographical sketch, part pronouncement on existence and literature, the French best-selling novelist Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life was published in France in 1991 and is the first non-fiction text ever published by the author. In this encomium, France’s most famous contemporary author praises his prewar American alter ego’s style, which couldn’t be much less like his own. With a foreword by a Lovecraft admirer, Stephen King, this eloquently translated edition is both an insightful introduction to Lovecraft’s dark mythology and Houellebecq’s deadpan prose.