Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred

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Anyone familiar with H. P. Lovecraft's work knows of the Necronomicon, the black magic grimoire he invented as a literary prop in his classic horror stories. There have been several attempts at creating this text, yet none stand up to Lovecraft's own descriptions of the Necronomicon . . . until now. Fans of Lovecraftian magic and occult fiction will delight in Donald Tyson's Necronomicon, based purely within Lovecraft's own fictional universe, the Cthulhu Mythos. This grimoire traces the wanderings of Abdul Alhazred, a necromancer of Yemen, on his search for arcane wisdom and magic. Alhazred's magical adventures lead him to the Arabian desert, the lost city of Irem, ruins of Babylon, lands of the Old Ones, and Damascus, where he encounters a variety of strange creatures and accrues necromantic secrets. From Publishers WeeklyFirst mentioned by H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920s and referred to throughout his fiction, the Necronomicon—a spurious book of occult knowledge—is so infamous that horror cognoscenti playfully speculate it might exist. Tyson (The Power of the Word) isn't the first writer to attempt a full "translation" of the forbidden text, but his may be the most comprehensive. After a brief history of the book's penning in the eighth century by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred (eaten by an invisible nasty for his efforts), the text unfolds as a series of interrelated chapters that anatomize Lovecraft's monstrous entities (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, etc.) in archaically musty prose, leavened with paraphrases of familiar passages from HPL's stories. Tyson embellishes this core material with the sort of astrologic and mystical content that Lovecraft himself considered nonsense. Readers who know Lovecraft's book from its evocative fragments won't be dissuaded from their belief that there are some things they are not meant to know. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"Scholarly horror, marvelously illustrated. Or as Lovecraft . . . would praise it: Ph'nglui nigliv'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeb wgab'nagl fhtagn. Id!" -- Kirkus