While Houellebecq's analysis of genre and the stories is interesting, there are many statements that are absurdly reductive or simply factually inaccurate. It sometimes reminds one of a first year university student trying to impress a professor with grandiose claims, as if confidence alone warrants credibility. This is strange, because Houellebecq seems quite familiar with many of Lovecraft's essays and letters. To justify the low score, I want to address two basic points: (1) the overreaching, inaccurate statements and (2) the many apparent misquotations. 1.) "None of Lovecraft's stories are introverted." (Page 66) Ex Oblivione, Hypnos, Azathoth, Polaris, The Silver Key and The White Ship are more enough to take issue with this. "In [Lovecraft's] entire body of work, there is not a single allusion to two of the realities to which we generally ascribe great importance: sex and money. Truly not one reference." (Page 71) "There is not the slightest allusion to the financial standing of his characters." (Page 75) The first quote is a fairly galling statement given how obviously obsessed with miscegenation, racial destiny, and phrenology a lot of HPL's work is. Medusa's Coil, The Horror at Red Hook, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth immediately come to mind. To say that there's nothing allusive to sex when the fear of the half-breed and one's own ancestry features so strongly misrepresents the situation. The word "orgy," while not always deployed to allude to sex, is also used in many stories. As for there being "not the slightest allusion to the financial standing of [Lovecraft's] characters," the ending of Celephais makes mention of the main character becoming a tramp while an "offensive millionaire brewer [...] enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility." It's a pretty obvious repudiation of "new money" types, which is entirely characteristic of HPL. The student in The Music of Erich Zann is described as "impoverished." The protagonist in The Shadow Over Innsmouth is also described as being thrifty in his travels as HPL himself had to be, relying on his ever-dwindling funds to indulge his taste for antiquarianism. Arthur Jermyn's "family resources were now sadly slender." In Hypnos there's talk of "when money ran low and drugs were hard to buy." Iranon also comes to mind, whose belongings consist entirely of a brier-torn robe and a laurel-like crown. 2.) Frustratingly, the book has its Translator's Notes section sneakily sandwiched between two bibliographies near the back. In short, the translator, whose bibliography includes many other works about Lovecraft, apparently found it unconscionable to leave out that even with the help of S. T. Joshi and David Schultz, two Lovecraft scholars, "...several instances remain where it wasn't possible to identify the original English source. Houellebecq was also unable to assist in locating or identifying these citations." Look at the attached pictures for more about this if you'd like to see what I'm talking about. Especially in the text of the first picture, the translator seems to nervously distance themselves from association with many of the supposed quotes from this book. While many of Houellebecq's comments on Lovecraft's effects on genre and culture were fascinating, especially in the early chapters, the effect is somewhat spoiled by the overreaching, inaccurate claims and the supposed quotes that even Lovecraft experts were apparently unable to verify.