To create a great popular myth is to create a ritual that the reader awaits with impatience, that he rediscovers each time with a greater pleasure, seduced again by a new repetition in a slightly different form, experienced each time as a greater profundity

Considered like this, things seem almost simple. And yet, successes are rare in the history of literature. It’s not at all easy, in reality, to create a new religion

Lovecraft [is] openly reactionary, he glorifies puritan inhibition and finds repellent any “open display of eroticism”. Resolutely anti-commercial, he despises money, considers democracy to be pure folly, progress an illusion

The oeuvre of Lovecraft is comparable to a gigantic machine for dreaming, of unheard-of magnitude and efficacy. There is nothing tranquil or reserved in his writings; the impact on the consciousness of the reader is of a savage brutality;

In effect, that which characterizes his oeuvre, as compared to a “normal” literary oeuvre, is that his disciples feel that they can, at least in theory, by the judicious use of the ingredients indicated by the master, obtain equal or even superior results

No-one has ever seriously considered continuing Proust. Lovecraft, yes. And it’s not simply a question of a secondary literature labouring under the sign of homage or parody, but of a real continuation. That makes it a unique case in the history of modern literature.

[Lovecraft] comes to recognize the inutility of all psychological differentiation. His characters just don’t need it at all; a set of sensory organs in good working order is enough for them.

Their only function, in effect, is to perceive. One could even say that the deliberate platitude of the characters of Lovecraft contributes to reinforce the power of conviction of his universe.

Any psychological trait too marked would have the effect of warping his exposition, attenuating its transparency; we would leave the domain of material sensation to re-enter that of psychological feeling. Lovecraft doesn’t wish to describe to us psychoses, but repugnant realities

the more monstrous and inconceivable the events and entities described, the more the description must be precise and clinical. You need a scalpel to decorticate the unnameable

The heroes of Lovecraft are stripped of all life, renouncing all joy, becoming pure intellects, pure spirits tending to only one goal: the search for knowledge. At the end of their quest, a frightful revelation awaits them: everything announces the universal presence of evil

The value of a human being is measured today by his economic efficiency and his erotic potency: exactly the two things that Lovecraft hated the most strongly

Fantastic writers are generally reactionary, very simply because they are particularly, one might say professionally, conscious of the existence of evil.

It is rather curious that amongst the numerous disciples of Lovecraft, not one has been struck by the simple fact: the evolution of the modern world has made Lovecraftian phobias ever more present, more alive

"as for Puritan inhibitions—I admire them more every day. They are attempts to make of life a work of art—to fashion a pattern of beauty in the hog-wallow that is animal existence—and they spring out of that divine hatred for life which marks the deepest, most sensitive soul

...An intellectual Puritan is a fool— almost as much of a fool is an anti-Puritan —but a Puritan in the conduct of life is the only kind of man one may honestly respect. I have no respect or reverence whatever for any person who does not live abstemiously and purely"

notes from houellebecq on lovecraft