Necronomicon Files Revised Ed [Paperback]

I snapped up the Simon version of the Necronomicon the month Avon released it in 1980. I won't bore you with the tale here, but so many unsettling synchronicities attended the purchase that I didn't have the nerve to read through it for over a year. So my mind has definitely been open to taking it seriously. At the same time, I was familiar enough with HPL's descriptions of the mad Arab's book to know it didn't match up, and was at least partly hoax. What a pleasure to find that nearly a third of this book discusses Simon's opus, exploring it from just about every angle. I found the authors' conclusions completely convincing.

Harms is a Lovecraft scholar; he gets almost a third of the book to discuss the history of the Necronomicon as an artifact of the fiction written by HPL and his circle. Even if you are one of those fans who share Howard's complete confidence that the only things that ever really go bump in the night are turns of bad plumbing, this part of the book alone justifies its space on your shelf. There's a bit of biography, a look into the evidence on sources, and a masterfully clear timeline of how, story by story, the notion of the Necronomicon was fleshed out. Harms sticks to business, discussing the Cthulhu mythos only to the extent that it bears directly on some detail about the book. (The one thing I missed seeing here was a catalogue of all the other non-existent companion titles dreamed up by Bloch and Smith and Derleth and the crew.) A reasonably complete list of published titles purporting to be the Necronomicon, with summaries and evaluations, is here too.

Then Mr. Gonce picks up the story from the perspective of the impact of the idea of the Necronomicon on the occult subculture. Of the many supposed "Necronomicons" on offer, only a few claim to include usable spells and rituals. And of these, only the Simon volume is sufficiently explicit and complete to have enticed any significant number of readers to try the contents out. The results have been, as Warren Zevon might have put it, not that pretty at all. So the core of the book devotes itself to untangling the origins of the Simon version, explaining why it is a hoax, and looking at the phenomenon of the many cults, most of them very tiny, that have sprung up around that hoax. Its grimoire is a pastiche from many incompatible cultures and some invokings invented out of whole cloth. As a practicing pagan, Gonce believes many of these individual spells "work", but the incoherence of the whole system means they don't work very well, and amateurs will get into magickal trouble because the book doesn't indicate how to banish what is invoked. For practicing skeptics in his readership, he provides sobering examples of manipulative cults and even murders, which show that you don't need to believe in magick to know that in the hands of alienated teens the Simon edition is bad juju.

All this is rounded off with a hilarious roll call of films and TV shows that have played off the Necronomicon meme. Many of the film reviews are several pages long, with plot synopses probably more entertaining than the movies themselves. And then each is scored for fidelity to Lovecraft.

If you have only one book about Lovecraft in your library, other than a biography, this is probably the one you want. If your circle of friends includes dabblers (or adepts) in magick, it definitely is.

Harms and Gonce have performed a scolarly study of the legendary tome of dreaded lore known as the Necronomicon. In their research, they examine the facts, the legends, and the history . . . and they place it firmly right where it belongs: a creation that originally sprang from the mind of fantasy/horror author Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

This book examines many facets of the "Necronomicon legend:"

* How Lovecraft came up with the idea and what might have inspired him;

* The popularization of Lovecraft's fiction and the subsequent arising of a popular opinion that he had been quoting an actual ancient codex;

* The production of the many modern faux versions of the Necronomicon, some firmly tongue-in-cheek and others carefully-reworded versions of extant ancient occult texts (none of which were originally titled "Necronomicon"), in response to the popularity of the title;

* The inclusion of references to the Necronomicon in films and television episodes in addition to written fiction.

The material presented is well-researched and factual, accompanied by proper citations where appropriate, and presented in some detail. In fact, it might well be presented in TOO much detail if the reader happens to be new to the "Necronomicon debate!" The amount of detail presented on both the literary origins and presentations of the Necronomicon, and the connections of the tome to modern Magick, will likely be far too in-depth for anyone interested solely in one and not the other!

But if you are someone with a true scholarly interest in the subject, you will find this book a wonderful thing! I consider it a "must-have" volume for anyone who is deeply interested in the "Cthulhu Mythos" born from H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, and equally so for anyone who has developed a similar interest in the legend of the Necronomicon as an occult studies issue.

Just a bit of warning, however: be prepared to have some things that you might have heard as "Facts" get firmly proven otherwise . . . !