This results in a confusion of ontological states, as people “are treated like or become things” (63) and objects “exhibit agency, they intermesh with the human, they prompt reconsiderations of where the line between human and nonhuman actually falls, and compel a reconsideration of the place of human beings in the universe” (76). Many of the essays support and extend Harman’s argument, such as Weinstock’s “Lovecraft’s Things: Sinister Souvenirs from Other Worlds,” which argues that Lovecraft’s fiction is set in an “enchanted world…in which the line between subject and object becomes muddled and obscured” (63).

However, the contributors to Sederholm and Weinstock’s anthology appear to have been more directly inspired by Graham Harman’s 2012 book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, which described Lovecraft as the progenitor of object-oriented ontology-a philosophical view that “posits a universe in which there is something in objects that always escapes knowing and in which human beings exist equally with other things” (5). This aspect of his work was first recognized by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus praised Lovecraft for illustrating the “process of being as becoming-becoming animal, becoming monster, becoming other than a fixed and finished human subject” (7). Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock argue in their new anthology, then this is due not only to his tremendous popularity but also the surge of interest in his work among contemporary theorists and philosophers-particularly in the field of posthumanist studies, where his work has been embraced for its anti-humanism or post-anthropocentrism.

If we are now living in the “age of Lovecraft,” as Carl H. In recent years the popularity of his work has grown even more thanks to comic, radio, film, and television adaptations as well as games and popular music, which have made Lovecraft’s name a household word-even among people who never read him. His stories have since reached a wider readership through numerous reprint editions, and in 2005 his work was even included in the prestigious Library of America series, which presented him as the modern successor to Edgar Allan Poe. Joshi began to edit a series of scholarly journals ( Lovecraft Studies, Lovecraft Annual, Studies in Weird Fiction, and Weird Fiction Review) that brought Lovecraft’s work to the attention of literary critics.

Lovecraft’s horror stories appeared regularly in pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, yet they gradually fell into obscurity following the death of the author and the decline of the pulp market.

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