Some Books by Brian Evenson

I’ve been thinking about doing a post on Brian Evenson for quite a while. I read Last Days about 3 years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s more of a thriller than a horror novel, but it’s about a cult who like to amputate their own body parts. Cool! It’s quite messed up. Although I’ve definitely forgotten most of the plot, I have not forgotten how much I enjoyed reading it.

The next thing I read by Evenson was Altmann’s Tongue, his first collection of short stories. I read this shortly after finishing Last Rites. Part of its appeal was that I had heard the contents were so extreme that it led to the author having to leave his job at a Mormon university. In truth, I remember almost nothing about this collection. I can’t say I was overly impressed, and I didn’t read anything else by Evenson for a while.

In December I read Father of Lies. I had seen this one described as a more straight forward horror novel than Evenson’s other books. It is truly fucked. It’s about a paedophile priest who is either insane or possessed by the Devil. I read it in an evening, and it almost pains me to admit that I really enjoyed it. It’s a horrid book, real feel-bad fiction. It was so unpleasant that I picked up and read another book by Evenson a few days after finishing it.

The Warren is more of a science fiction novel than the ones mentioned above, but it’s gloomy existential science fiction rather than Star Wars or the likes. This was another book that took me less than a day to read and has encouraged me to venture outside the realms of straight horror recently. It’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in contemplating the limitations of identity and what it means to be a person.

So Brian Evenson has also written novels for movie and video game franchises under the pen name B.K. Evenson. I presume this is about separating his “literary” work from the more commercial stuff that he writes. I have no real interest in this books about video games, but after searching my local library’s database for audiobooks by Evenson, I found Feral.

Feral is a collaboration Evenson did with James DeMonaco, the author and director of The Purge movies. I haven’t seen any of those films, but I have a general idea of what they’re about. When you think about it, a story of violent survivalist action/adventure put through the filter of a literary author with a penchant for nastiness could turn out very well. I am happy to say that Feral pulls it off quite successfully.

A pandemic hits the world and turns all men into fast zombies that really hate women. After 3 years, only a few small armoured settlements of women are left. Allie is a scout in one of these settlements, and she spends her days looting abandoned stores for food and goods while dodging, incapacitating and sometimes kidnapping the feral male zombies. She rides around on a motorbike and carries guns and machetes and is basically a total badass. Things get worrying when she notices that there are far more males skulking around her territory than usual. To complicate matters further, one of these males doesn’t seem to be infected.

This is not the kind of horror I usually enjoy. The most similar thing I’ve read was probably Brian Keene’s The Complex, a novel that I wanted to like but struggled to enjoy. Feral was better though. I don’t know the story behind it, but given DeMonaco’s work in film, I assume this was originally an idea for a movie. I think it would work well as a movie, but I understand that the zombie film market was probably oversaturated in the years prior to 2017 when it came out. Also, I can see how the pandemic element to the book may have discouraged studios from considering the idea in the few years after it was released.

Feral is definitely more typical of the horror genre than Evenson’s other works, but it was fast paced and entertaining. I quite liked it. I don’t know if I’ll discuss them here, but I am quite certain I will read more of Evenson’s books in the future.

James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia

You may have noticed that most of the books I’ve reviewed this year have been relatively recent. This is because I am back studying part time and relying on audiobooks as I do the dishes to get through any reading at all. For the last week, I’ve been listening to James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia. It’s a bit older than the other stuff I’ve read recently.

**Grand Central Publishing – 1998 (first published 1987)**

The Black Dahlia is an excellent book, and the subject matter is truly horrifying, but I’ve been on the fence as to whether I should post about it here or not. It contains horrendous acts of cruelty and depravity, so it kind of fits the bill, and it was previously reviewed on the toomuchhorrorfiction blog, so I reckon it’s fair game. While it’s not a horror novel, it is so dark that I imagine most people with an interest in horror will likely be interested. It’s also really good.

I didn’t know what to expect going in. I had seen people saying this book was great, but I didn’t know what kind of a book it was. It’s a novel. It involves a crime that really happened, but it’s not a novelisation or even speculative fiction. Most of the characters here are made up. The book is described as “neo-noir”. I’ve only read a few books of “noir” fiction, but Ellroy’s writing was far grittier than those. This was written in the late 80s, and it doesn’t hold back on any fronts. Everyone in this book is a piece of shit, but it’s this element that makes it believable. It’s also what makes the book very funny in parts.

After reading the book, I had to do a little research in the case. It’s truly horrible stuff. There’s a heavy metal band named after it. I remember I bought a ticket to see them once because Cephalic Carnage were opening for them. When I got to the show, I realised I had left my ticket at home, so I had to buy another. I left after a couple of the headliner’s songs. Not my thing. I wouldn’t cross the road to see Cephalic Carnage at this these stage either to be honest. I wish I could go back in time to save my money.

I reckon I’ll read more books by Ellroy in the future, but I doubt they’ll get reviewed here. This one was great though. Read it if you haven’t already.

Kathleen Hale’s Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls

A few years ago I started posting about true crime books. For the last decade, the tagline of this website has read “Horror and Occult Book Reviews” and in keeping with the theme of the blog, I’ve only posted about crime books focusing on cases that involved the occult in some way. Most crimes are horrific in some regard, but horror fiction does not play into many crimes in the same way that occult beliefs frequently do. There is, however, one infamous criminal case in which horror fiction plays a central role, the 2014 Slenderman stabbing of Waukesha, Wisconsin. While the story of 2 children attempting to stab their friend to death as a sacrifice to a sinister internet boogeyman seems rather suitable for a website like this, I have avoided discussing it here for personal reasons.

At this point, I doubt many of the freaks who spend their time reading blogs like mine don’t know the story of Morgan Geyser and Annisa Weier. When they were 12 years old, they became convinced that a character they read about on the internet would let them come and live in his mansion if they murdered their best friend. This seems absolutely crazy, and that is because one of these girls was suffering from severe case of schizophrenia and the other kid was impressionable and messed up in her own ways. Together they formed a very toxic relationship that school counselors and parents failed to notice until it was too late. They stabbed their friend 19 times and left her to die in the forest while they headed towards the forest to find Slender Mansion.

The book I read, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, was good. It doesn’t focus on the sensational aspects of the story and rightfully directs its readers’ attention to the shortcomings of the education, rehabilitation and mental health systems in America.

While the victim of this affair is obviously the child who was stabbed, it’s hard to believe how badly the support systems in Morgan Geyser’s life failed her. This book was published 4 years ago, and Morgan was recently in the news again for trying to flee her group home. I don’t think anyone suspects she’s out to hurt anyone at this point, but she is clearly very insane. The entire story of this case is horribly depressing. If you’re interested though, this book is a good place to start.

So apart from the fact that I generally avoid reading about children getting hurt, I’ve specifically avoided covering Slenderman stuff in the past because of my personal connection to the story.

I was 16 years old when we got the internet in our house. My parents knew nothing about the web, and my friends were computer nerds. I very quickly learned how to delete my browser history and how to connect with other like minded weirdos. I used to post on a few different heavy metal forums, and on one of these I befriended a user called DevilMatt666. He was 14 years older than me, and I thought he was really cool. He had seen Pantera live and used to describe things that he liked as “mint”. I’m pretty sure he’s the person who first introduced me to the music of Glenn Danzig. We weren’t best friends or anything, but I would have interacted with this guy several times a week for at least 4 or 5 years. When the internet changed and forums started to die, Matt was one of the few posters I added on facebook.

I remember sitting in work one day in 2014, reading the news. I had seen mention of the Slenderman stabbing but hadn’t bothered reading about it properly. When I saw a headline mentioning this incident and the name Morgan Geyser, a bell went off in my head. I knew that name. My internet buddy Matt’s last name was Geyser, and I knew his kid’s name was Morgan because he posted about her all the time. I had seen a constant stream of pictures of this kid as she grew up. Honestly, one of the things I liked about Matt was the fact that he was a big, long haired heavy metal dude who was absolutely enamored with his little girl. Underneath the tattoos and sick goatee was a big softy. When I saw the photos in the news article, I knew it was her.

Matt disappeared from the internet for a while, and when he returned he was a broken man. In truth, the only things I remember about him from this point on were the endless posts about missing Morgan and not being able to stop crying. I saw comments and articles on the internet labelling him as a Satanist and a monster, but as far as I could see, he was a really lovely man. I got rid of facebook in 2020, and it was only after reading a recent article on Morgan’s escape that I read that he died 3 years ago. This was a real bummer, but even when he was alive I found it hard to imagine a happy ending to his story.

Knowing that he was dead and that calling attention to this case was no longer potentially going to upset him, I read this book about what happened. It was actually quite challenging to get through. Part of this is the fact that it’s an all round sad story, but my familiarity with some of the characters and the fact that I have my own kids now made it quite a struggle to get through. Keep an eye on your children.

Two Books about Hell – A Short Stay in Hell and The Divine Farce

I read two books about Hell recently that were both really, really good.

A Short Stay in Hell – Steven L. Peck

I picked this up on a whim a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. It’s a horror novel set in Hell, but despite some fairly brutal violence, the actual horror here is made up of a kind of philosophical dread instead of any Satanic sadism.

A Mormon dies and wakes up in Hell to find that his religion was false but that the real god is somewhat lenient in his wrath. The Mormon is doomed to stay in Hell, not for eternity, but only a limited time. The amount of time is determined on how long it takes him to find a specific book in a library.

This doesn’t sound so bad, right? Even the biggest libraries we’ve built wouldn’t take too long to comb over. The difficulty for the protagonist is that he’s not stuck in a university library. He’s stuck in the Library of Babel, the one described in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. This library is very big indeed. It contains every 410 page book that could possibly be composed out of the 95 characters most keyboards can print. When you start thinking about how many books that makes, it becomes quickly apparent the library contains a rather large number of books indeed.

The vastness of that number, which is arbitrarily small when you think about it, is where the horror lies. The notion of existing in any state for half as long as it might take to find the book makes eternal oblivion seem preferable. The living conditions in the library are not generally that bad. The inhabitants there have unlimited food, companions and warm beds. It’s the amount of time that they have to spend like this that messes with your head when you start to think about it. Personally, I think the idea of any form of eternal consciousness seems nightmarish.

This book is short, entertaining and subtly horrifying. I strongly recommend you all read it.

The Divine Farce – Michael S.A. Graziano

After finishing A Short Stay in Hell, goodreads recommended Michael S.A. Graziano’s The Divine Farce. Graziano is another academic. (He’s a neuroscientist, while Peck is an evolutionary biologist.) I had enjoyed Peck’s book so much that I was delighted at the prospect of reading something similar.

Again, I was pleasantly surprised. This is another one about Hell, although here, the characters don’t seem to remember anything about the life that lead them to Hell. The whole plot seemed a bit like an allegory for life. Things start off with the characters trapped together in what seems like an upright coffin. They remain here for untold ages before escaping into a vast cavern filled with other maladjusted freaks. They get separated, and the rest of the story follows one of them as he tries to make sense of his new existence.

This book is also very short, and I don’t feel any need to further discuss the plot. It was very entertaining, and I recommend that you track it down and read it.

Hailey Piper’s A Game in Yellow

I have subscriptions to a few different public libraries. Most of the horror that they offer is quite new, and I generally avoid that kind of thing. In recent months, I’ve read a few very enjoyable works of modern horror, and so I’ve been a bit more open to stuff from the library. The other day, I was looking through Libby, and I saw the audiobook for a title named A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper. It seemed liked it would offer a new spin on Robert Chamber’s King in Yellow mythos, and the blurb of the book mentioned S&M, so I downloaded it.

Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this book at all.

It’s about a woman who isn’t finding sex with her partner satisfying. This leads to them trying more extreme forms of bondage. These attempts to spice up their sex life don’t work, and so the main character resorts to reading pages from The King in Yellow, a play that drives people insane. This works very briefly, but she overdoes it and falls victim to the King.

The plot is a pretty cool idea, but the main character was a boring, self centered, unpleasant piece of crap. Her negativity drained all tension out the book. I wasn’t able to bring myself to hate or pity her. She was just annoying, the kind of person I would avoid at all costs. I could not have cared less about what was going to happen to her. The other characters were more interesting, but their roles in the book really only served to give an insight into how much of an annoying loser the protagonist was.

There was one part where she overhears the women in her office chatting about how handsome a man is and this makes her look down on them. She’s supposed to be gay, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t be particularly interested in cute guys, but to look down on people for what they like is an asshole thing to do, especially when they’re just having a chat at work to get through the day. I’m not gay, but if I heard my gay or straight female coworkers talking about how cute a guy is, I’d be happy to join in on the chat or at least take a look to see what the fuss is about. Her response to her coworkers is, “Is he what gets you wet, or is he what you’re told to want?” This really reminded me of a lame dork I knew as a teenager who had “You laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at you because you’re all the same.” written on their backpack. Go back to Hot Topic, you sniveling, cringey dork.

She was also vindictive, careless about the safety of others, frequently late for work, completely humorless, frigid and sneaky. She was such a dose that I really wanted the book to be over soon after starting.

Fred Chappell’s Dagon

**Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. – 1968**

I’ve wanted to read Fred Chappell’s Dagon for years. I knew it was one of the more esteemed Lovecraftian novels and that it was written by a writer who wasn’t specifically a horror guy. I went into the book thinking that Fred Chappell was a noir fiction writer, but apparently I made that up. He was actually a poetry and literature kind of chap. Dagon confirms this. It’s definitely a bit deeper than tentacle monsters.

This book is categorized as Southern Gothic. I read some books by Faulkner and O’Connor when I was younger, and I mostly remember them being sad, sweaty, claustrophobic things. Chappell’s Dagon definitely contains those elements, but it starts off like half of August Derleth’s Lovecraftian stories: an academic inherits a farm that contains sinister and disturbing secrets. This one has bloody chains in the attic and a family of hideously ugly freaks living in a shack on the edge of the property. There’s also a pile of seemingly indecipherable documents containing references to Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth that seemingly drive the reader insane.

From here on, I’m going to discuss how the book ends, so if you haven’t read it, go and do so before continuing with this post. The book is not a masterpiece, but it was thoroughly unpleasant, and I quite enjoyed reading it.

So after the protagonist reads some of the weird letters in his house, he falls in love with a freakishly ugly young woman and murders his wife. He then spends the rest of the book drinking himself to death and getting tortured by the ugly mutant. After being held down and tattooed in front of a bunch of people, he is thrown in a hole and dies.

My immediate response on finishing the book was that I loved it. I really enjoy when horror novels end horribly. I kept thinking about this one after finishing it though, and in retrospect, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why did the main character kill his wife? They had an argument, but murdering her was a bit excessive. Why was the girl so ugly? Her face is described as fishlike, but are we to believe her ancestors hailed from Innsmouth or was she just minging? Why does the author passively let her destroy him? Who are the people that she involves in his torture? Are they in a cult? Why are the Lovecraftian deities mentioned? Nothing supernatural happens here.

As somebody who mostly reads trashy fiction, it unnerved me to have so many unanswered questions at the end of a book, but none of these issues actually bothered me when I was reading. Things generally do seem more horrific when they don’t make sense, and I think that the omission of these explanations was intentional.

The combination of Lovecraftian horror and Southern Gothic doesn’t really work. (Although it worked a Hell of a lot better here than in Lovecraft Country!) The genres are just a little too far removed from each other to mesh cohesively, but Chappell’s effort to do so was about as successful as we could realistically hope it to be. It’s not a perfect book, but I enjoyed reading it and i am still thinking about it a week later.

I’ve been hitting the fiction hard recently. I read 4 novels this week, and I wasn’t sure which to post first. There’s lots of cool stuff coming up in the next few weeks, so check back regularly!

2025, The Year in Review

Another year has come and gone, and I’m still here blogging about creepy books. I sometimes wonder if I’m going to run out of weird stuff to read, but as I dig deeper and deeper into the archives of the occult, the horrifying and the Fortean, that seems less and less likely. At the same time, I am always interested in book recommendations, so please reach out if you have any!

For the last few years, I’ve tried to split my posts evenly between fiction and non fiction. This year, I read more trashy novels than anything else, but many of these were by the same authors, so I grouped them. I did posts on Sidney Williams, Ray Garton, and Stephen R. George.and Whitley Strieber. I planned to do the same for John Russo and Jack D. Shackleford, but the books I read by them were so bad that I abandoned my plan. I also read The Omen and The Exorcist series and The Wickerman books.

I ended up reading quite a bit of modern horror too. I used to avoid stuff that was written in this century, but there are still some talented authors alive today. I really enjoyed the books I read by David Sodergren and John Langan.

I read some other fiction that falls outside of the aforementioned categories. I was super excited to finally get my hands on a copy of Otto Fredrick’s elusive Count Dracula’s Canadian Affair, and the research for my post on Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories led me to see a ghost. I really enjoyed doing the reading for my posts on Nicolas Hawksmoor and Jack the Ripper.

I focused on conspiracies last year when it came to non-fiction. I did a few conspiracy texts this year, but also included some crime, some aliens, some cryptozoology and some general Fortean weirdness. The Mad Gasser of Mattoon was a bizarre highlight. Also, I apologise to anyone who was deeply offended by my silly post on Fascist Yoga. Perhaps the strangest text I encountered was Martti Koski’s My Life Depends on You! In May, I was interviewed on the Bonversations podcast about some of this stuff.

I also did a few books on occultism and Satanism. I think I’m going to be a bit more picky about the grimoires I choose to review on here in the future. I went looking for something quick to review the other day, and after starting a grimoire, I did a little research on the author and discovered that he was literally mentally disabled. Still, I did enough studying of occult lore in 2025 to learn how to raise some tentacled Elder Gods from their deathly slumber. I was also finally able to read a copy of How to Become a Sensuous Witch. It was everything I hoped for.

February of this year marked an entire decade of Nocturnal Revelries. For several of those years, this blog was pretty much my only creative output. This summer, I started writing my own music, and I have been focusing more of my free time on that recently. This is partly why I didn’t post as frequently during the summer. Nevertheless, as the year progressed, I managed to balance my 2 hobbies. I will be taking a course in the evenings over the next few months too, so hopefully I’ll find a way to juggle that too. I have a few bizarre texts lined up for the near future, so please check in regularly.

I’ve written posts like this for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. I’ve quite enjoyed the blog recently, so I’m sure I’ll be doing another one of these posts at the end of 2026 too.

Thanks, and happy New Year!

D.E. McCluskey’s Zola

I read A Helping Hand by Celia Dale this week. It was an utterly horrible book, but it was more a horrifying thriller than a horror novel. This left me with only 2 days before my weekly post, so I set out to find something short and fast. I’ve been reading fairly serious stuff recently, and I wasn’t in the mood for anything heavy or thought provoking. I thought back to Aron Beauregard’s The Cuck, a ridiculous splatterpunk horror novel that I breezed through last year, and decided that something along those lines would be perfect. Then I remembered reading about Zola, a notoriously disgusting book that somehow involved cheese. Perfect.

Yeah, this is ridiculous, disgusting garbage. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. That’s just what it is. It’s just gross-out scenes following gross-out scenes with little in the way of plot. The basic premise is that an abused housewife murders her husband after finding out that he has raped their son. This leaves them liberated from his abuse, but completely incapable of living a normal life. The results are murder, cannibalism and extremely poor hygiene. There’s cheese involved in all of these. I think that’s supposed to be funny. The characters have to eat cheese when they’re murdering or violating others.

I didn’t like the fact that the author had to use the rape of a child as the catalyst for the story. Yeah, it makes you want the rapist to suffer, but it’s lowest common denominator when it comes to fueling outrage. It’s not really necessary for the plot, and it honestly seemed lazy to me. I’m sure some fans of extreme horror would defend the author and claim I’m too woke or easily offended, but that would make them people who enjoy reading books about children getting abused, so I’m ok with the likes of them not agreeing with me. This element was just horrible. It’s not entertaining or funny.

After the first few chapters, Zola veers into bizarro territory, and nothing bears any resemblance to the real world. It was from this point that I began to enjoy the book. It gets so, so silly. I laughed heartily when Gordon, the main character, started eating handfuls of his own cum and referring to them as Gordoncakes. There was another part where he tries to marinade his mother’s decaying breasts in a shitty toilet bowl that also made me giggle. There’s literally a line in this book that says, “I’ll wrap the steaks in her dirty, then get the gravy from the toilet.” The “dirty” referred to here is the character’s dead mother’s shit filled knickers. LOL. It reminded me of Sea Caummisar’s Scatology, another extremely intelligent and classy novel.

Hopefully it will be another while before I have to resort to this kind of garbage again. I do quite enjoy the silliness, but the edginess grates on me.

John Langan’s The Fisherman

I don’t remember how I heard of this book, but I picked up a copy recently and really, really enjoyed it.

A man loses his wife to cancer and takes up fishing as a means to occupy himself. He makes friends with another recent widower and they start going fishing together. On the way to a new fishing spot, they stop at a diner for breakfast, and the owner tells them a chilling tale about the spot they are heading to. Nevertheless, they go there anyways.

The story they’re told in the diner makes up the bulk of the book, and it’s probably the scariest part. I was listening to an audiobook version before going to bed, and it scared the shit out of me. I’ve read my share of horror novels, and it’s quite rare that they actually creep me out like this one did. It was horrible and disturbing but purposefully written.

I’ve seen this referred to as Lovecraftian horror, and while I see the influence, this does not read like Lovecraft at all. The characterisation and imagintive plot reminded me of Stephen King at his best. The author used to be a university lecturer, and it seems his work is considered “literary horror”. I was too busy enjoying the book to really notice this except for when the author lifted lines directly from Moby Dick and put them in his own characters’ mouths. I only noticed this because when I read Moby Dick as a young man, I liked these specific lines so much that I wrote them on a sticky note and kept it in my wallet for years.

I know I’m not saying much here, but I deliberately avoided any kind of spoilers before reading this. I’m glad I did, and want you to do so also. Get a copy of this book and read it. I’m confident in saying that this was the most enjoyable novel I read in 2025. I’m looking forward to reading more from this author in the future.

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.