Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
The Heroic Nerd
By Luc Sante
Tales
by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Peter Straub
Library of America, 838 pp., $35.00
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Dorna Khazeni, with an introduction by Stephen King
Believer Books, 245 pp., $18.00 (paper)
That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft's stories as 'hackwork,' with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Talesand Amazing Stories, 'where...they ought to have been left.'[1] Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult—there is no other word—that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.
Review, 3398 words
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