Customer Reviews

Lovecraft, A Study in the Fantastic

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Levy's book is filled with explorations of neat themes in Lovecraft such as attics (vs. cellars), dreamworlds, stairways dug from underground up... The book's charm as well as weakness is that it points out Lovecraft's relation to other thinkers (Poe, Hawthorne, Freud, Einstein, Le Fanu) but doesn't get bogged down working those relations out.

It's a shame to see this excellent older study of Lovecraft out of print - buy it NOW in case someone doesn't do a reissue. Based on Levy's 1969 doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, the book employs a kind of easy-going French phenomenolgy (he cites Gaston Bachelard a few times) that's ideal for communicating the element of "atmosphere" which Lovecraft made the foundation of his horror fiction, both in theory and practice. More recent criticism, like Donald Burleson's deconstructive reading and Michel Houellebecq's ranting, misquoting manifesto, have some interesting things to say, but are so thesis-driven that one comes away with very little sense of the concreteness of Lovecraft's world. Levy's treatment of the little nuances of style, narrative texture and imagery, the open-endedness of his analyses, and his obvious sympathy with HPL the man make this the ideal companion for anyone venturing into the mythos for the first time, but if you're a compulsive Lovecraft reader (as so many of us are), you'll find yourself having new insights every time you look into it - and the chapters all have a self-contained quality that makes for easy browsing. The translation and notes (1988) by master-Lovecraftian
S.T. Joshi are superb.