“The Picture in the House”: The narrator, who is bicycling through the Miskatonic Valley seeking genealogical data, is caught in a rainstorm and seeks shelter in a ramshackle house, where he encounters a preternaturally old man who turns out to be a cannibal.
“Polaris”: In dream, the narrator is tasked with manning the watch-tower of Thapnen, to warn against a siege by the city’s foes, the Inutos. Unfortunately, the Pole Star casts a spell on him, and he falls asleep at his post. He awakens to real life, but believes he still dreams and vainly tries to “awaken” so that he can warn his fellow Lomarians of imminent attack by the Inutos.
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“The Shadow over Innsmouth”: See Olmstead, Robert (whose name is provided only in HPL’s notes for that story).
“The Shunned House”: The narrator is the nephew of Dr. Elihu Whipple; his own profession is not specified. As a youth, the narrator heard much about the mysterious “shunned house,” about which Whipple had conducted considerable research. His interest piqued by his uncle’s findings, he visits the house with increasing frequency, until he stays there overnight and observes “the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation” that he had seen there in his youth. He and Whipple attempt to eradicate the entity, but during their vigil the entity overtakes Whipple and the narrator is compelled to kill his uncle to release the old man from the grip of the entity. Finally, he pours carboys of acid into the earth to destroy the thing.
“The Silver Key”: See Phillips, Ward (who is identified as the narrator only in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”).
“The Transition of Juan Romero”: The narrator is a laborer in the Norton Mine, in the American Southwest. He and Romero investigate a strange throbbing sound emanating from the mine. Romero becomes separated from the narrator and disappears into the cave. The narrator sees something he cannot describe, nor can he be certain whether he has seen anything or merely dreamt it, but somehow he escapes the mysterious fate that befalls Romero.
“What the Moon Brings”: The narrator admits to being terrified of the moon and moonlight, because they seem to transform the known landscape into something unfamiliar and hideous. “Nathicana.”
Poem (99 lines); probably written no later than 1920, apparently in conjunction with Alfred Galpin. First published in the Vagrant([Spring 1927]).
A poem speaking in Poe-like accents of the mysterious woman Nathicana. It was meant as “a parody on those stylistic excesses which really have no basic meaning” (HPL to Donald Wandrei, [August 2, 1927]; ms., JHL). Apparently Galpin was somehow involved in the composition, as the pseudonym under which the poem was published (“Albert Frederick Willie”) alludes in its first two names to Galpin and in its last name to his mother’s maiden name, Willy.
Necronomicon.
Mythical book of occult lore invented by HPL.
The work is first cited by name in “The Hound” (1922), although its purported author, Abdul Alhazred, was cited as the author of an “unexplainable couplet” in “The Nameless City” (1921). HPL states that the name Abdul Alhazred was supplied to him at the age of five by “a family elder—the family lawyer [Albert A. Baker], as it happens—but I can’t remember whether I asked him to make up an Arabic name for me, or whether I merely asked him to criticise a choice I had otherwise made” (HPL to Robert E.Howard, January 16, 1932; AHT). The coinage was somewhat unfortunate, as it contains a reduplicated article (Abd ul Alhazred). A more idiomatic coinage would have been Abd el-Hazred.
HPL cited his book so frequently in his tales that by late 1927 he felt the need to write a “History of the Necronomicon” to keep his references consistent. At that time he noted that the work had been written by Alhazred around 700 C.E. and titled by him Al Azif(a term HPL lifted from Samuel Henley’s notes to Wil
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liam Beckford’s Vathek,referring to the nocturnal buzzing of insects). It was translated into Greek in 950 by Theodorus Philetas but subsequently banned by the patriarch Michael. HPL then attributes a Latin translation of 1228 to Olaus Wormius, mistakenly believing that this seventeenth-century Danish scholar lived in the thirteenth century (see “Regner Lodbrog’s Epicedium”). HPL notes an English translation by John Dee—a detail Frank Belknap Long provided in “The Space-Eaters” ( WT, July 1928), written earlier in 1927 and read by HPL in manuscript (see SL2.171–72). In a late letter ( SL5.418) HPL attempts a derivation of the Greek title: “ nekros,corpse; nomos,law; eikon, image=An Image [or Picture] of the Law of the Dead.” Unfortunately, HPL is almost entirely wrong. By the laws of Greek etymology, the word would derive from nekros, nemo(to divide, hence to examine or classify), and -ikon(neuter adjectival suffix)=“An examination or classification of the dead.”
How HPL came up with the idea of the Necronomiconis unclear. His first mythical book was the Pnakotic Manuscripts, cited in “Polaris” (1918); an unnamed book is mentioned in “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). Donald R.Burleson (“Lovecraft: The Hawthorne Influence,” Extrapolation22 [Fall 1981]: 267) notes that an “old volume in a large library,—every one to be afraid to unclasp and open it, because it was said to be a book of magic” cited in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebooks, which HPL is known to have read around 1920; but recall that among the “infinite array of stage properties” that HPL in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” identifies in the standard Gothic novel were “mouldy hidden manuscripts.” Poe’s tales are also full of allusions to real and imaginary books. Probably no single source is to be identified in HPL’s use of the mythical book.
HPL’s longest quotations from the Necronomiconoccur in “The Festival” (1923) and “The Dunwich Horror” (1928). Indeed, the book is rarely quoted elsewhere; instead, its contents are merely alluded to. Robert M.Price (“Genres in the Lovecraftian Library,” CryptNo. 3 [Candlemas 1982]: 14–17) identifies a shift in HPL’s use of the book, from a demonology (guide to heretical beliefs) to a grimoire (a book of spells and incantations). Still later, as HPL “demythologized” his imaginary pantheon of “gods” and revealed them to be merely extraterrestrial aliens, the Necronomiconis shown to be considerably in error in regard to the true nature of these entities: in At the Mountains of Madnessthe narrator notes that the Old Ones of Antarctica were “the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomiconaffrightedly hint about.”
When asked late in life by James Blish why he did not write the Necronomiconhimself, HPL noted that in “The Dunwich Horror” he had cited from page 751 of the work, making the writing of such a book a very extensive undertaking. He wisely added: “…one can never produceanything even a tenth as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hintabout. If anyone were to try to writethe Necronomicon,it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it.” This has not stopped several individuals over the past twenty-five years from producing books bearing the title Necronomicon,some of which are indeed clever hoaxes but surely very far from HPL’s own conception of the work.