On April 30th 2021, I wrote a review of ‘Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft’ on my LibraryThing profile. Unlike my other more conventional reviews, I decided to write it as a pastiche of Lovecraft’s own writing style. The following was the result:
H. P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (London: Gollancz, 2008), 878pp. Selected and edited by Stephen Jones.
My first abortive attempt to acquire a copy of the Necronomicon came in April of 2018, when I prevailed in an online auction. By chance – or so I assumed – the tome was due to arrive in the mail around the time of Walpurgis Night, that time of year when it is said that Hell emerges on the earth and Satanic minions gather for unspeakable deeds and festivities, which I found appropriate given the nature of the book. However, by mid-May, with the Satanic hordes having apparently receded and the sun chancing to shine, this dark bible of the proto-Hadean races of forgotten aeons still had not arrived. In correspondence with the anonymous seller, he assured me that the book had been posted, but that there had been said to be queer occurrences at his local post office, and perhaps the package containing the tome had been lost.
I suspected at the time that the seller had been reluctant to release the book, given the auction had specified no reserve and I had succeeded with a paltry sum that would have been little recompense to him for such a treasure, and that his vague claims of postal interferences were a ruse in order to retain the tome. Whether truly lost, or withheld, or perhaps intercepted by some third party, I have never been able to precisely determine, but I learned that, amidst our correspondence, the seller had fled to Turkey for a supposed holiday. In the interim, I had acquired a full refund, and the anticipated book never reached me. Whatever my frustrations at the time, I now believe that this Anatolia-bound fugitive, whether out of fear, greed, or perhaps a higher code of honour than is to be found in the eBay Seller’s Guidelines, was, in denying me this foul tome, operating with my best interests at heart.
Discouraged by the affair, and with other disruptive events in my life taking precedence over my naïve foray into the realm of occult acquisition, it was a long time before I made further inquiries into a copy of the Necronomicon. My secundal attempt to acquire the book online proved much less obstructive than the first, and a different copy of the Necronomicon arrived from a different seller one ill-starred day in June of 2020. The book looked impressive – a stout, leather-bound tome promising, in gold filigree on the black cover, ‘The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft’. Here, at long last, was the work of a writer I had long felt a deep and strange desire to read. The name of ‘Cthulhu’, a dread elder god seemingly of Lovecraft’s manufacture, had long been echoing in my head, though with a different pronunciation each time it occurred. Aside from this portentous echo, my only knowledge of the author had been ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, which had served as the basis for a quest in the video game Oblivion, part of the Elder Scrolls series.
Nevertheless, despite my long-awaited success in procurement of the volume, and the enticing presentation of the Necronomicon as a touted Commemorative Edition, it was still a while before I began reading the book. I first cracked the spine of this accursed tome in February of 2021, prompted by the encouragement of a man I had believed a friend. He was a convinced acolyte of Lovecraft who, I now suspect, had darker motives; perhaps a cultist directed by the Old Ones, or a servant of some other demoniac agency, or even a demon himself.
In the months since that portentous day, I have dipped in and out of the Necronomicon with increasing fervour. The stories were, at first, ghost stories; disturbing and inventive ones that could create a deep chill in the reader’s heart. Initial ones like ‘Dagon’, and those which involved dungeon-delving, pleasingly recalled that Elder Scrolls series I have already mentioned. Each story was of a high calibre, and though a formula quickly emerged, Lovecraft’s skill as a writer vanquished any thoughts of sameness. However, the writer was verbose, obscurant and seemed to possess an aversion to dialogue, which made the stories slow and often difficult. Words like ‘fulgurous’ were used without abatement, and there were long, dense passages of prose with long, accumulative sentences. However, the stories were also brooding, Gothic and deeply fascinating; each and every one of them rewarded the effort made to read them. I began to appreciate, respect, and increasingly revere the influence of Lovecraft upon the horror genre.
As I progressed through the book, this respect began to take on forbidding proportions. The stories increasingly displayed an erudition that transcended pulp horror, and established Lovecraft as a literary writer in his own right. The terrors he revealed in the stories were, paradoxically, often left unrevealed: monsters and events that were described as ‘inexplicable’ or ‘beyond description’. Rather than being a cheap trick, this technique was often rooted in archetypal fears of depths, darkness and the unknown: perhaps the unknowable, which goes beyond the bounds of the rational or even instinctive human mind. Even the stories of the Cthulhu Mythos – the entire cycle of which is included in the tome – retained this nameless fear, despite their monster being named and described. The stories, assembled in chronological order, began to discuss quantum mechanics, naming the likes of Planck and Einstein and other venerable interlopers against the hidden hand. So complete was Lovecraft’s oppressive Gothic effect that such scientific discussions often came as a surprise; I had otherwise fallen into the trap of aligning Lovecraft, chronologically speaking, with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, when he is in fact a contemporary of Hemingway and Joyce. For all his archaic trappings, Lovecraft is dealing with modern dilemmas: of the interplay of science and myth, and the Nietzschean diagnosis of a dead God; of the unmanning frontiers of outer space and the deepest recesses of earth and ocean; of consciousness itself and the deeply-rooted Jungian archetypes by which we fashion approximations of our deepest-held fears.
I began to become increasingly convinced of the tales. The dark streets of Arkham became more real to me than my hometown; the river waters of the Miskatonic more natural in their meanderings than any babbling brooks which reside nearby. I dreamed strange dreams and slept mostly in daylight; my mind not daring to conjure in dark midnight hours those images which danced from the pages and found root in the primordial recesses of my brain, as easily as if they had already been nested there in some comparable archetypal form. I noted, with increasing unease, the mentions in the text that the Necronomicon was not a tome comprising ‘The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft’, but was instead a book-within-a-book, an unspeakable collection of subterranean Babelian invocations and eldritch rites composed or curated, so the story goes, by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I wondered if perhaps my initial abortive seller from two years previous had not fled to Turkey, but was, in fact, returning there, perhaps reined in by a sultanic master or cult suzerain in order to prevent further dissemination of copies of the forbidden Necronomicon.
I wondered, then, why my secundal attempt to acquire the book from a different seller had been so uncomplicated in comparison to the first, and if the acquisition was not perhaps a trap laid for me by unknown agents, or a penalty for not having heeded the warnings from my first abortive encounter. My increasing attraction to and investment in the stories, and the growing madness that I began to associate with them, seemed to confirm this hypothesis. I began to notice typos in the main body of the text; at first a simple substitution of a letter which could be forgiven as a mistake, a transcribing or proofing error; but then entire phrases (“he had and swered” instead of “he had answered”), until finally I noticed that even that demoniac appellation, Necronomicon, had at least once been rendered as ‘Necroriomicon’.
The conventional trappings of the book – the feeling of wood pulp, the publisher’s mark of Gollancz, even the Afterword by Stephen Jones (which, though it would serve better as a Foreword, would still contain lamentably insufficient warning of the corrupting abominations contained within these pages) – did not assuage my unease. I now believe that the mistakes and corruptions in the text were not corruptions at all, but letters fragmented from an extradimensional realm – perhaps Kadath or R’lyeh or the Court of Azathoth – in which such distorted, bonded shapes pass for written language. In this realm, Necroriomicon is not a proofing error replacing Necronomicon, but a name by which the same book is known in a slightly altered realm distinct from ours.
I fear that the potent, eternal Necronomicon that was divined by Alhazred is trying to break out of its linguistic chains and sublimate into our own, through this similarly-titled and seemingly innocuous vehicle for Lovecraft’s stories. I can only hope prospective readers see my growing madness as a cautionary tale and flee from even the mere mention of the name ‘Necronomicon’, even when the seductively chthonic tome is found reasonably priced online. For you see, the typos I identified were not typos at all, but an attempt at communication and dissemination. They were words written by a hand that was not human.
To read some of my more conventional reviews, you can visit my Goodreads profile here. I have also written a science fiction novelette called Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, which can be found here.
The images used in this post are public domain and were made available by the Heritage Type Company here. I have no affiliation with the company.
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