ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with representations of making or fabricating life, monstrosity, horrific ekphrasis – or description of living pictures – cannibalism, and vampirism in H. P. Lovecraft's novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and the short stories "The Picture in the House", "The Rats in the Walls", and "Pickman's Model". Lovecraft's horrific creations constitute a rhetoric capable of addressing cultural crises, while his monstrous vision anticipates a new paradigm, whose emergence the authors are witnessing. Lovecraft's oeuvre anticipates with such Gothic anxiety the exploration of those quandaries to which post-humanist sensibility is a response. Of course, it is important to be aware of the fact that the term "post-humanism," or "post-humanist sensibility," designates a rather loosely defined, heterogenous cultural and scientific paradigm, whose label is indeed very generously slapped onto very diverse phenomena. Lovecraft's monstrous artifacts manifest both the horror writer's anticipation of the post-humanist sensibility and his gravitation towards the pre-modern ways of producing knowledge.
