More Necronomicons: The Book of Dead Names, The R’lyeh Text and Al Azif

Exactly 10 years ago, I reviewed the Simon Necronomicon. While that is probably the most famous hoax Necronomicon, there have been others.

Earlier in the year, while I was researching Alan Moore for my posts on Nicholas Hawksmoor and Jack The Ripper, I came across a review he had written of The R’lyeh Text that made me want to read it. After a bit of searching, I realised that The R’lyleh Text was a sequel to a 1978 version of the Necronomicon that’s usually referred to as the Hay Necronomicon after its editor, George Hay.

The Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names

**Skoob – 1996 (Originally published 1978)**

Colin Wilson’s book on the occult was one of the first I read in the topic, and while it led me to countless other books and resulted in the creation of this blog, I’ve never bothered to read any of his other works. Actually, my low opinion on Wilson got me in trouble with another historian of the occult a few years ago. Wilson wrote the introduction to this Necronomicon and reading it did not change my opinion of him. He was well read, but full of shit. This introduction is considerably longer than the actual text that it is introducing.

The text of the Necronomicon here is supposedly taken from a ciphered manuscript that had been in the possession of John Dee. It was decoded with a computer program. Wilson presents the claim that Lovecraft’s father had been a freemason and occultist and had somehow acquired a copy of this manuscript and either told his son about it before he went insane or left a copy lying around their home.

The story is obviously bullshit, and the text it presents isn’t particularly interesting. I love Lovecraftian prose and black magic, but these aren’t entertaining if they’re not sincere. None of the rituals in here are things that anyone is going to do. It’s not even like reading a Lovecraftian story where the verbose ramblings add to the suspense. I knew this book was a hoax when I started it, and it felt truly underwhelming reading it.

There’s three essays included after the grimoire part to flesh the book out, but none of them were particularly interesting. One of them was by Angela Carter. I recently read and quite enjoyed her The Bloody Chamber.

The R’lyeh Text: Hidden Leaves from the Necronomicon

While the Hay Necronomicon went through a few editions, its sequel, The R’lyeh Text, only went through one. This has made it harder to come by at a reasonable price. Let me warn you my friends, don’t spend a lot on this if you’re thinking of buying a copy. It’s boring crap.

There’s another lengthy introduction from Colin Wilson. This one chirps on about Edgar Cayce and Atlantis, the Sirius Mystery, Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley, the Marquis De Sade and the Piri Reis maps, all in an attempt to prove that Lovecraft’s mythos stories were based in fact. I was astounded at how boring this introduction was given my interest in the topics it covers. Again though. this may have had something to do with the fact that I knew the book was a hoax and that Wilson was literally bullshitting. I think it may also have had something to do with the fact that Wilson’s writing is a bit dull.

The grimoire text here is the remainder of the text that was published in the Hay Necronomicon, and it is even less interesting. There’s a few essays included too. One of them discusses the Red Book of Appin, and another has put me on the trail of a book about a talking mongoose, but neither was interesting enough to save The R’lyeh Text.

Truly, I was quite disappointed by these books. If you’re going to make a fake Necronomicon, you should to overdo it. Throw mystery and mythology to the wind and include brutally violent rituals of heinous, tentacled evil. Nobody is ever going to believe it, so at least make it fun.

Al Azif – Abdul Alhazred

The Hay Necronomicon includes a section on a different version of the Necronomicon that had been published in 1973, the Owlswick Necronomicon. (Hay’s book does not make reference to the Simon Necronomicon even though version had come out a year before Hay’s.) The Owlswick Necronomicon is a hoax book that contains a short introductory essay by Lovecraft biographer L. Sprague De Camp in which he claims to have been sold a dodgy manuscript from the Middle East that killed whoever tried to translate it. It’s supposedly written in Duriac, a non-existent language, and it’s actually just a bunch of scribbles. It’s the kind of book that’s just going to take up space on your shelf after a couple of moments of initial amusement.

I’m really thinking of doing a Lovecraft re-read next year. This crap has me longing for the good stuff.

VOLUBILIS EX CHAOSIUM: A Grimoire of the Black Magic of the Old Ones by S. Ben Qayin

**Dark Harvest Occult Publishers – 2011**

I didn’t finish my novel on time for this week’s post, so I rapidly consumed another book of Lovecraftian black magic. This one was written by a guy called S. Ben Qayin. I was going to read a different book by this author a few years ago, but I saw that he was involved with the becomealivinggod twats, so I didn’t bother. When I saw this fairly short Lovecraftian grimoire earlier on, I couldn’t resist.

I’ve read a lot of grimoires, and I’ve often claimed that I enjoy the more sinister ones. I once read a grimoire about killing yourself in a graveyard, another that describes how to make a giant bell with a human corpse as the clangy bit, and another that instructs the magician to make a giant sausage packed with festering human flesh. Of course, the more sinister these things get, the less likely they are to be taken seriously by anyone. Some of these books seem like they were written to entertain the reader more than to instruct them, and that’s definitely the feeling I got from Volubilis Ex Chaosium.

Ok, so aside from a little self mutilation, but there’s nothing all that sinister about this book. You wouldn’t have to be a completely evil psychopath to follow the rituals herein, but you would have to be fairly silly. There’s a few prayers to Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, but despite S. Ben Qayin’s best efforts to convince us otherwise, we all know that these are fictional characters. This book is basically just fan-fiction. I am obviously a fan of Lovecraft, so I was reasonably entertained, and if I found a very cheap copy of this book, I would gladly keep it on my coffee table to make guests feel uncomfortable, but I can’t imagine anyone taking actually staying up late at night to go and do blood rituals to Yog-Sothoth in a forest. If I’m wrong and you do that kind of thing, I’d love to chat with you.

All things considered, I quite enjoyed the 45 minutes it took me to read this. I was sitting in my car, drinking coffee and eating a coconut donut at the time. I may go back and read more S. Ben Qayin in the future. It’s 5 years since I wrapped up my big Lovecraft reread (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5), and reading this grimoire made me want to do another. I might stick with a greatest hits collection this time around.

Carl Nagel’s The Handbook of Black Witchcraft

I had originally planned to post about a different book today, but I realised I needed to do some more research to do it justice, so I sought out a ridiculous pamphlet of black magic. I found one by my old pal, Carl Nagel. It starts off with a depiction of a badass Satanic human sacrifice, but then it turns out that the author is only describing this scene to say that it’s not true witchcraft. Obviously, this was quite disappointing. I was hoping this would be a grimoire of cool satanic murder rituals.

In the next section, we learn that “Black witchcraft” is “older than the centuries”. I assumed that meant it was prehistoric, but we find out in the next paragraph that it was born in the middle ages, so I’m assuming that Nagel originally meant to say that it was older than “some centuries”.

This is followed by a description of how witches used to be initiated into their covens, but Nagel then acknowledges that the readers of his work won’t have any friends, so he tells them how to initiate themself into a coven of one. They basically light a few candles and think of witchy stuff.

The guts of the pamphlet (about 5 pages) consists of a handful of silly spells. It’s the usual crap: how to attract lovers, how to make a voodoo doll, how to make a rival impotent… There’s really nothing unique or original here.

This is another instance where I find it hard to imagine a person stupid enough to take this shite seriously. When I refer to this as shite, I mean it. This book is smelly, smelly poopoo from a dirty bumhole. Carl Nagel actually has quite a few publications too, and I am very curious as to what his threshold of success is. How many copies of his last book does he need to sell to convince him to write more? Surely there can’t be more than 2 or 3 imbeciles alive who would pay for this heinously soiled adult diaper.

Math, Dreams, Magic, all are one in Yog-Sothoth!

A few weeks ago, I was emailed a pdf of an academic paper on math. In 1992, Robert Birrell submitted his master’s thesis on the “analysis and construction of the small inverted retrosnub icosicosidodecahedron”. The small inverted retrosnub icosicosidodecahedron, a 3-d shape, and apparently it’s one of the more complicated uniform polyhedrons out there. Its complexity led to it being referred to as Yog-Sothoth, one of the Outer Gods of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.

Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.

So this Robert Birrell guy was clearly a nerd of the highest order, and for his Master’s thesis, he actually built one of these things. The essay I read is a description of how it was built. It does contain a section of the Lovecraftian origin of the shape’s name, but math isn’t my strong point, and most of the document went completely over my head. I wanted to do a blog post about Yog-Sothoth, but the paper I had read didn’t really give me enough material. Birrell has no internet presence that I could find, but I did find another nerd who had built a model of the small inverted retrosnub isohoohoo. I emailed him and asked if anything eldritch or bizarre occured during its construction, but he didn’t respond. (I want to make it very clear that when I use the word “nerd”, I do so with sincere respect. These are great men.)

I went looking for more Yog-Sothothery, but most of the books containing that name in the title are manuals for role playing games. I came across references to a grimoire named Liber Yog-Sothoth, but only a few copies were ever printed. The author, John Coughlin uploaded a pdf version of the central rite of the text, and that is freely available online. I read through it, and in honesty, it seemed as incomprehensible to me as the paper on geometry. The description of the rite is mostly limited to its script, and although I now know the basic steps of the ritual, I’m not really sure of the purpose behind it. The idea of summoning Yog-Sothoth is pretty cool, but what am I going to do with him when he shows up?

K’aem’nhi kh’rn K’aem’nhi kh’r K’aem’nhi kh’rmnu.

I was intrigued by this bizarre text, and I decided to further investigate the author. I found that he had written another book on Lovecraftian magic, and although physical copies are equally as scare, a pdf of this one, A Cthulhian Grimoire of Dream Work, was floating around online. I had to read it.

A Cthulhian Grimoire of Dream Work

Last year, I read a grimoire called Gravelording. It was a bizarre book that described how a person would bring themselves closer to death so that they would have any easier time speaking to spirits in a graveyard. It was ludicrously silly, and it wasn’t until after finishing the book that I realised it was inspired by a novel written for children. The basic idea was that to communicate with dead people, you first have to almost kill yourself by starving yourself and going without sleep. I was reminded of this book when I started reading Coughlin’s A Cthulhian Grimoire of Dream Work because Coughlin’s work gives almost the exact opposite advice.

The first section in the book outlines the Rite of Cthulhu. It’s pretty cool. I like the idea of shrieking “Cthulhu Fhtagn!” in a cave with my mates, but this rite is only supplementary to the rest of the book. The remainder is essentially a manual on how to induce lucid dreams. You could do the rite of Cthulhu if you wanted to try to point your dreams in a certain direction, but you could also skip it completely. In the next section, Coughlin advises the prospective dream voyager to tidy their room, drink some herbal tea, do a little stretching and to avoid television, caffeine and strenuous exercise before bedtime. This guy wants you to have a good night’s sleep! I was reading this just before going to bed too, so I was very appreciative of the author’s very good advice. I did a bit of snooping online about this guy, and he seems like a nice, good person. This suspicion was confirmed when I emailed him and received a prompt and polite reply.

I would have preferred to read something more heinous, but that says more about me than Coughlin. These books were not written for a mass audience, and from what I have seen, they actually contain fairly sensible advice. (Lucid dreaming, unlike gravelording, is a real thing.) Personally, I would prefer a book that explains the process of inducing horrible nightmares. I’ve had some pretty horrendous dreams before, but it would be kind of cool to be able to choose to dream about the great old ones destroying society and enslaving humanity.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

Oh, and by the way, I recently appeared on the Bonversations Podcast. We talked about this blog, the Unabomber, Robert Anton Wilson and conspiracy theories. Give it a listen here.

Anna Riva’s Secrets of Magical Seals and Domination

It is a rare occurence that a week goes by without a new post on this website. I try to arrange my reading so that I have something to post about every Sunday. Things have been a little busy recently, and while I have several posts started for the near future, I am waiting to finish other books before posting them. Last night, I found myself scrolling through my archives of magical texts in the hopes of finding short enough to digest before my deadline today. I’ve been in this situation many times before, and I’m generally able to find some ridiculous pamphlet from Finbarr books about playing with wee or waggling your dick in the mirror to post about.

**International Imports – 1999 (Originally published 1975)**

Last night, I found 2 short grimoires compiled by Anna Riva. The first was a text called Secrets of the Magical Seals. It was extremely disappointing. It was just a collection of seals and pictures that Anna took from other books. I have an old Dover edition of Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs & Signets, and just a glance through that proved that it was the source of many of the images in Riva’s book. The actual instructions in Riva’s book are dull and uninteresting.

I was disappointed, but not discouraged, so I read another of Riva’s magical texts, this one called Domination: The Art of Casting Spells. I thought this might be a little juicier, but it’s not. It describes how to manipulate a person with a doll stuffed with their pubic hair, but nothing else of any interest.

Anna Riva put out crap like this for decades. What a load of shit. I am sorry for this dreadful, lackluster post. I just didn’t want you to think that I haven’t been doing my homework.

How to Use Spam to Enchant your Man: Abragail and Valaria’s How the Become a Sensuous Witch

This has been on my radar for years, but a cover like that will make finding a book difficult regardless of its contents. I assumed it was going to be kitschy trash, and never considered paying more than a few dollars for a copy. Luckily for everyone, Dr. Jerrold Coe, the guy who runs the fantastic Paperbacks of the Gods blog uploaded a copy of How to Become a Sensuous Witch to archive.org.

I was very pleased to read this for free, but its contents lived up to my expectations. This is drivel. It’s mostly a collection of recipes for a woman to cook when she’s having a lover over for dinner. Some are given witchy names (Samhain Soup, Satan’s Steak…) but most are just normal recipes (green bean salad, cauliflower curry…) and some are just gross:

Aside from recipes, there’s a few spells and rituals included. Most of these involve muttering inane rhymes, but there was a couple that involve ingesting period blood and piss. (You mix both into salad dressing or something to mask the taste.)

One section I found amusing was the chapter on “Getting Rid of a Freddy”. This chapter gives you some recipes to use when you want to scare a man away. One of them involves giving him some damp biscuits. It’s a bit bizarre.

This book is definitely of its era. It advises the prospective witch to feed her man dessert but not to take it herself because she should want to be skinny. I feel like most modern witches would probably not appreciate that advice.

There’s little of interest to a real student of the occult in here, but this is an interesting little book because of what it tells about the time when it was published. Occultism and witchcraft were becoming sexy, and women were being encouraged to be promiscuous, but self empowerment still took the form of learning how to cook for a man and keeping thin. It’s nice that the book is now available to look through online, because it’s certainly not worth paying collectors prices for.

Go back and take a look at the cover there. Look at her grip on that candle. Hell yeah.

Turn Invisible and Invite God over for Tea: Graeme D. Brown’s Invisibility: Also The Evocation of God

I’ve had a pretty mad week, and I put all of my reading time into finishing Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It was a pretty good book, but it’s a bit far removed from the theme of this blog. To make sure I got a post out this week, I sat down last night and read another pamphlet from Finbarr Publications. This one was of an even lower quality than their usual fare.

Invisibility; Also The Evocation of God
A Magickal Treatise by The Master Desilius
Graeme D. Brown (2006)

The text is split into 2 parts. The first is a spell to become invisible.

The introduction to this section is baffling. It claims that true invisibility is impossible, but it also states that the author’s method of turning invisible shrouds the magician in a cloak of darkness which renders them invisible. It then warns that the invisibility ceremony should not be used “just whenever one wants to”, but in the very next sentence the ceremony is described as a “method which can always be used.”

Part One of the text outlines the author’s philosophy of existence. It’s extremely stupid. He gets very wishy-washy, talking about dimensions of reality. It’s absolute bullshit that ends with the claim that the only way forward is to perform Satanic rituals to tame demons to stop them from interfering with our thoughtforms.

Part Two focuses on developing your chakras so you can better control your thoughtforms so they don’t turn into poltergeists.

Part 3: don’t wank or have sex for a few weeks, then perform a Satanic ritual that summons a demon to give a ring the power of invisibility. Be careful that the demon doesn’t hypnotize and kill you.

It might seem like I’ve left big parts out or completely misunderstood the text here, but I really haven’t. It’s actually that stupid. It makes no sense at all.

In the second text, the author gives instructions on how to evoke God. We’re not talking a demon or a spirit here. This is the big one, the actual creator of the universe. The instructions are poorly written scraps that have been cobbled together from other magical texts. They’re so silly they’re not even worth summarizing. It’s about 10 pages of crap that only the most mentally deficient moron could take seriously. I’m not even being mean. This is extremely silly garbage.

This “Magickal Treatise” was quite disappointing. There was no effort put into the writing here. Spells to turn invisible and to evoke the creator of the universe should be more entertaining than this. Also, I am not sure why the author refers to himself as “Master Desilius in the book’s title. A more apt appellation would have been “Graeme D. Brownfingers”*.

*He has brown fingers because pickypicky bumbum.

Gary Brodsky’s How to Use Black Magic to Get Women (to lick your crack)

How to use Black Magic to Get Women – Gary Brodsky

Honestly, I sometimes forget where I get my books. I’ll buy or download a bunch and come across them years later when looking for something to read. Thus was the case with Gary Brodsky’s How to use Black Magic to Get Women. I’ve read a lot of books, but the only other pick-up manual I’ve read was Robert Johnson’s absolutely terrible The Satanic Warlock. I’m not looking to “get women”, but I decided I’d see what Brodsky had to say on the topic.

This was pathetic, even in comparison to the other crap I review here. Truly, it is hard to imagine anyone taking anything in this piece of garbage seriously, and even harder to imagine anything in here actually working.

Brodsky comes across as a true idiot. I’m not exaggerating or trying to be mean here. He actually seems like a very stupid person. At one point he describes himself as “someone who knows a thousand times more than” his readers on the topic of Black Magic. He later goes on to explain that understanding the actual workings of the spells he is presenting is entirely irrelevant to their efficacy. At no point does he offer any explanation as to how his spells operate. It’s enough to just rub some oil on your feet. That will convince the nameless spirits to help you get the woman of your dreams.

The actual “spells” presented are garbage. Light a candle with your true love’s name engraved on it. Take a bath and think of the girl you like. The weirdest one involves stealing crumbs off her plate and then pissing on them. This will make her find you irresistible.

The language he uses is revolting and telling of the kind of man that this book is written for.

She has rejected you so often, and yet soon, she will not be able to swallow enough of your penis, she will not be able to get her tongue deep enough into the crack of your ass, no matter how hard she tries, she simply will not be able to get enough of you.

I don’t know. People can like what they like, but wanting to make a woman lick your crack because she doesn’t like you is pretty nasty.

Gary Brodsky obviously had a very limited knowledge of Black Magic, and this book is obviously aimed at horny incels rather than true students of the occult. It turns out that nearly all of his other books are pick-up manuals, including How To Dominate Women, Charm The Pants Off Any Woman, The Alpha Male Guide and How To Pick Up Exotic Dancers. Yuck. While his books are vile, his youtube videos are even worse. Featuring such classic lectures as GARY BRODSKY GOES SUPER ALPHA, GARY BRODSKY RIPS FEMINSM TO SHREDS, MEN ARE BECOMING SISSYS and WHY WOMEN ACT LIKE BITCHES, Brodsky’s youtube channel is filled with gold. It seems like he used to get drunk and record himself ranting for hours at a time about feminism, being alpha, getting sexy women and any other nonsense that would pop into his head. I clicked on one of his videos, but turned it off to ruminate after he said,

“The PC bullshit agenda ok, is steroids, not steroids, I mean, is communism with tits. that’s all it is.”
– GARY TAKES ON THE SATANIC AGENDA

One of the most interesting features of Gary’s videos is the cross he wears in many of them. You’ll also notice him frequently talking about the Bible and the importance of God and Jesus. In one of the videos he discusses how homosexual acts are an abomination to God. I wonder how a god who hates gay people feels about a man making a woman lick his hairy asscrack out of spite.

I could go on, but Gary did a pretty good job of showing what kind of a person he was. Watch his videos if you can stomach them. He died in 2016.

Bits and Pieces from the Tomb: Thomas K. Johnson’s Graveyard Wanderers

Thomas K. Johnson is an academic who translated 37 books of Swedish folk magic as part of his PhD thesis in 2010. These books comprised of spells that had been passed down through generations of the “wise people” From these translations, Johnson picked out all of the spells involving stuff that comes from graveyards (dirt, bones, coffin nails…) and compiled them into this macabre collection.

The Graveyard Wanderers: The Wise Ones + The Dead in Sweden

**Society of Esoteric Endeavour – 2013**

There’s spells to stop birds moving, to hex and un-hex a gun, to turn invisible and to kill a tree. Most of these spells involve mixing graveyard dirt into different things and then spreading it on whatever you want to affect. Another common way to invoke the magic of the dead is to hammer a used coffin nail into something. Doing so to a horse shoe will render the horse lame, and doing so to a piece of shit will give the shitter a bad case of diarrhea. Seriously. If you can’t find a coffin nail, but still want to give somebody the trots, you can also fill a human bone with your victim’s shit and then let a river flow through the bone. (My advice would be to let it flow over your hands too, unless you want to be a Mr. Shitty Brownfingers.) If you want help from the dead in raping a woman, stick a coffin nail in her piss. (I’ve heard from a reliable source that a more efficacious way of achieving this goal is to drink a pint of bleach.)

Speaking of piss, to cure a child who has had a stroke, their mom should piss in a skull and then give it to the kid to drink. If there’s no skulls handy, mom can just piss in her hand and give it to her thirsty whippersnapper that way. (It was only a year ago that I reviewed another grimoire that used a lot of piss magic.) If you want to turn invisible, plant some peas in a human skull and when they grow, put them in your mouth. If you want to get really close to a bird without it flying away, make a mask out of a human skull and approach the bird while looking through the eye sockets of the deceased. There’s also a cool section in here that describes making a belt from the skin of a corpse’s abdomen. When created properly, this belt allows its wearer to turn into a werewolf.

I quite enjoyed this book. Many of the spells are ridiculous, but this is folk magic, and it made me think about what ordinary people valued and how they tried to make sense of the world a few hundred years ago. It reminded me of The Black Books of Elverum, another collection of Scandinavian spells. Only 180 copies of the fancy embossed cover hardback of Graveyard Wanderers were printed, but a paperback copy is now available for anyone who wants this in their library.

The Grimoire Inspired by a Children’s Book written by a Sex Pest: Var Von Brennos’ Gravelording

Long time readers of Nocturnal Revelries may recall an era (mostly 2018 – 2019) when the blog focused on strange grimoires of black magic. Most of these books are boring garbage, and I don’t read many anymore, but occasionally I come across something that piques my curiosity. Such was the case when I found a copy of a book called Gravelording by Var Von Brennos. What the Hell is Gravelording? The book in question was short, so I decided to find out.

Gravelording – Var Von Brennos

Gravelording is becoming a Lord of a Graveyard. Being a Gravelord allows one to converse with the dead and to order them around to do ones bidding. To become a Gravelord takes a huge amount of time and effort, and I am entirely certain the process outlined in this book has never been carried out by any human being. The basic idea is that you spend your nights in a Graveyard and limit your sleep and food intake to bring you closer to death. There’s also instructions on how to make a wand, how to open a Ghoul Gate, and how to reanimate a corpse. The reanimation part is very vague about why you would want to do so.

Most of the book is written in deliberately archaic English, but Var Von Brennos occasionally lapses into the vernacular and tells his readers not to be sloppy (when exhuming corpses from abandoned graveyards).

I enjoyed reading this book for the most part. It reads like something out of a horror story. It advocates the kind of behaviour that you’d expect from a ghoul. This is not surprising considering the fact that the only webpage I can find that discusses the author claims that his background is in Lovecraftian Sorcery. My only real critique of this book is that it seems to be creepiness for the sake of creepiness. The whole concept of this book is so far away from anything that a normal person would ever want to do that it almost felt like a prop book from the set of a horror movie. If I’m wrong about this, I’d love to hear from any true Gravelords out there.

When I got to the end of the book, I glanced through the bibliography and saw some old friends. There, beside the works of Lovecraft were listed Leilah Wendell’s The Necromantic Ritual Book and Liber Falxifer. There were a few other grimoires listed and a book by Neil Gaiman called The Graveyard Book. This caught my eye as I had actually glanced through a copy of the graphic novel version of Gaiman’s book on that very same day. I’d been meaning to read something by Gaiman for a while, so I decided to give it a look. One does not ignore such synchronicities! Once I started reading The Graveyard Book, Gravelording began to make a lot more sense.

The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman

**Harper Collins – 2018 (First published 2008)**

The Graveyard Book is the story of Bod Owens, a child who grows up in an abandoned graveyard after his parents are murdered. He converses with the dead, travels through Ghoul Gates and has the spirits of the dead protect and empower him. It’s a book written for 9-12 year old children, but it has clearly been a huge inspiration on Von Brennos’ work of sinister black magic. Some of the magical incantations in his grimoire are directly lifted from Gaiman’s novel.

Some panels from the graphic novel version of *The Graveyard Book* and some lines from *Gravelording*.

So, to tell the truth, I actually haven’t finished The Graveyard Book yet. I’m listening to the audiobook, and I still have a few chapters left. I’m a bit annoyed though because I was really enjoying the book, and I googled it to see what age group it was initially aimed at. I saw that this book is currently in the news because Disney have just stopped a movie version being produced. Apparently Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual misconduct by 5 different women. Now I obviously don’t know the ins out outs of Gaiman’s sex life, but from what I have read, he does seem to have been quite the creep. This is quite disappointing. Still though, The Graveyard Book is an enjoyable read. If you want to check it out, make sure you pirate a copy so you’re not giving any money to Greasy Gaiman.