This week, I’ve got two books I highly recommend: The Lovecraftian short story collection Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow, and the essay H.P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life.

LOVECRAFT UNBOUND

I’ve learned that if a collection has the words “edited by Ellen Datlow“, you’d best just go ahead and plunk your money down, because it’s gonna be good.  Lovecraft Unbound is no exception.  In fact it starts off with one of my very favorite Lovecraftian stories not written by Grandpa himself: The Crevasse, by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud.  The Crevasse has beautifully written prose, is set in Antarctica, and perfectly captures the Lovecraftian theme of mankind’s insignificance in the cosmos.  Consider the following passages:

Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn’t been evidence enough of humanity’s divine disfavor.  That’s what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he’d ever had from her: God’s judgment on a world gone mad.  Garner had given up on God by then: he’d packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn’t.  Not then, and not later, when he’d come home to face Elizabeth’s’ mute and barren grave.  Garner had taken McReady’s offer to accompany the expedition soon after, and though he’d stowed the Bible in his gear before he left, he hadn’t opened it since and he wouldn’t open it here either, lying sleepless beside a man who might yet die because he’d had to take a piss — yet another cosmic joke — in a place so hellish and forsaken that even Elizabeth’s God could find no purchase here.

There could be no God in such a place.

And:

Something moved in the darkness beneath him: a leathery rasp, the echoing clatter of stone on stone, of loose pebbles tumbling into darkness.  Atka whimpered again, legs twitching as he tried to shove himself back against the wall…

Vast.  The place was vast: walls of naked stone climbing in cathedral arcs to the undersurface of the polar plain, and a floor worn smooth as glass over long ages, stretching out before him until it dropped away into an abyss of darkness…

And my favorite passage:

A gust of wind scattered fine crystals of snow against the window, and he found himself wondering what the night would be like in this cold country.  He imagined the sky dissolving to reveal the hard vault of stars, the galaxy turning above him like a cog in a vast, unknowable engine.  And behind it all, the emptiness into which men hurled their prayers.

A moody story which I greatly enjoyed, and 19 other wonderful stories after that.  This book belongs in any Lovecraftian’s collection.  Click here to buy it (buying it through this link will help support The Lovecraft eZine).

H.P. LOVECRAFT: AGAINST THE WORLD, AGAINST LIFE

If you want to understand H.P. Lovecraft and the themes behind his work, you should really read Against The World, Against Life.  It is written by Michel Houellebecq.  While reading this book, I felt such a kinship with Lovecraft the man, the way he thought, the way he felt… his intense weariness with the world.

So many passages ring true for me, such as:

Life is painful and disappointing.  It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels.  We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.  Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us.  All those prodigiously refined “notations,” “situations,” anecdotes… all they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our “real life” days.

Now, here is Howard Phillips Lovecraft: “I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.”

And:

Those who love life do not read… No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.  As for Lovecraft, he was more than a little fed up…

“The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles.”

Click here to purchase H.P. Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life.  And if you’ve read these books, or have anything to add, please comment below.