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Title: Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind Lovecraft's Legend by Daniel Harms, John Wisdom, III Gonce ISBN: 1-57863-269-2 Publisher: Weiser Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.58 (12 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Impressive and First Rate
Comment: Everything anyone could possibly want to know about the history and background of "The" Necronomicon. Every library should have a copy of this excellently researched and nicely written book. Clear, concise, well reasoned -- and unfortunately all too rare to get a hold of.The last section itemizing theNecronomicon in film and television is amusingly done and valuable in and of itself.Most of all, the authors' careful, informed, level-headed approach to the entire cultural phenomena thathas developed out of Lovecraft's fictional grimoiredeserves praise. Obviously a labor of love.
Rating: 5
Summary: The definitive work on all aspects of the Necronomicon
Comment: This book is the result of an incredible amount of research. The Necronomicon is covered in all aspects - as a creation of Lovecraft, his inspirations in its creation, as a book of real magic and the many (certainly more than I knew about) hoaxes and literary recreations. Detailed coverage of its history in film (including cameos), television, comics, etc. All this and yet it reads smoothly and well and you can hold it with one hand. A must have have Lovecraft fans.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Necronomicon debunker's bible
Comment: I've been rereading and enjoying Lovecraft, man and boy, for fifty years now. I haven't been a full-blown fan, but I've absorbed several volumes of discussion and criticism. In depth of detail, documentation, readability and balance, this one is head and shoulders above anything else I've seen. Once I track down Daniel Harms' Encyclopedia Cthuliana, I'll be able to toss my old Lin Carter. Hey, it was about to start flaking and putrescing anyway.
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.
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Title: The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab by Robert M. Price ISBN: 156882162X Publisher: Chaosium, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Encyclopedia Cthulhiana: A Guide to Lovecraftian Horror by Daniel Harms ISBN: 1568821697 Publisher: Chaosium, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Shadows over Baker Street by Michael Reaves, John Pelan ISBN: 0345455282 Publisher: Del Rey Books Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror #1 by Marvin Kaye, Lee Tanith, H. P. Lovecraft ISBN: 1592241476 Publisher: Wildside Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The White People and Other Stories: The Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen by Arthur Machen, S. T. Joshi ISBN: 1568821727 Publisher: Chaosium, Inc. Pub. Date: 01 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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