hronir.htm

“It is a book that should never have been written; having been written, it is a book that deserves burning – and I say this in all solemnity, I, a scholar, a man who loves books and who serves them. But the world is not conducted for our pleasure…as the reader of the Necronomicon very soon discovers.”

- Dr. Henry Armitage

Kevin Jackson was “once witness to the embarrassing spectacle of a teenage goth attempting to purchase a copy of the Necronomicon” (Jackson 1999). This is obviously all the result of a silly misconception. The poor lad was evidently not in full possession of the facts. Far from being impossible to find, the potential buyer should first ascertain which version of the title he in fact requires.

· The limited edition published by Owlswick Press in 1973, with an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp, the main text as yet untranslated.

· The version by ‘Simon’ with its lengthy introduction on Sumerian magic and Aleister Crowley, Schlangekraft 1977 and Avon (paperback) 1980.

· Or George Hays’ translation of the renowned Voynich manuscript that turns out to be Dr John Dee’s copy of the dreaded work, Neville Spearman 1978, Corgi (paperback) 1980 and the Skoob reprint (along with the R’lyeh Text) in 1995.

· Or the modern title edited by Robert Price that includes Lin Carter’s interpolation and also Price’s own masterly critical commentary on the (generally agreed) extant passages.

· Further afield, as title alone, there is H.R.Giger’s collection of artworks. And the psychomania film magazine. Or even Savage Pencil’s Rock’n’Roll Necronomicon with the “bonus opportunity of meeting the Elder God of your choice!”

So perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on the young gentleman in Jackson’s story.

The Book of Dead Names (or the Book of the Image of the Law or Al Azif and so on) is not singularly non-existent. Its true state is perhaps quite the opposite. The book appears in many different forms to all those interested enough to respond to its siren call. In fact, the nature of (the existence of) the Necronomicon has been a long standing joke amongst Lovecraft devotees – “Who was it that said if the Necronomicon really existed it would by now have appeared in a paperback edition with an introduction by Lin Carter?” (Price 1996) This telling comment on the perpetually disappointing nature of previously unknown, hidden and reviled magical texts on exposure to the real world of modern secular, scientific cynicism can be reversed.

The Necronomicon does now exist in paperback, albeit in some cases written by Lin Carter as opposed to introduced. The Book of Eibon, or what is left of it, is also surprisingly extant. Does this therefore mean that the Necronomicon exists? Of course it does.

Certain works (or non-works, lacunae of literature) and authors seem to provoke this peculiar response. How many versions of Byron’s burnt notebooks have there been? Lost notes of Dr. Watson? Hitler diaries? Unpublished episodes in the life of Freud? Aside from vanished metal discs, what prompted the Book of Mormon? And other media: O Brother Where Art Thou? was finally made after all.

Even if the actual text is not brought to light in itself, some works acquire a thick mantle, a shell of referential accretions that gets thicker with time, obscuring the sight of a core that is not the grit in a pearl of wisdom but invisible and unreal. Returning to Lovecraft (as one does), he started it with the History of the Necronomicon written in 1927 and published by the Rebel Press in 1936. Is the most successful hoax one that manages to claw its way into reality?

The American author Michael Chabon is one of the select few who promote the works of a little known writer called August Van Zorn. Van Zorn was another of the many authors influenced by Lovecraft and Arkham House in the USA originally published his short story collection, The Abominations of Plunkettsburg. He appears in several of Chabon’s works and a short story by Van Zorn has recently been republished in a Chabon collection (Werewolves In Their Youth). An overview of his work is available at Chabon’s website.

In the British Library there exists the only known copy of Enoch Soames: The Critical Heritage, a collection of essays on the life and works of the poet who wrote Fungoids and Negations in the early 1890s. This text, definitive in so many ways, contains an essay (again by Kevin Jackson) on the connections between Soames and the French Symbolists, an essay culled in the main from the notes of Hugo Vernier, author of Le Voyage d’Hiver. This last book, so influential on late nineteenth century French literature, has in turn inspired a series of sequels by other hands, collected and published by Atlas Press.