H. P. Lovecraft did not invent the idea of the arcane tome, one so evil its very existence meant insanity and worse for its possessor. The idea is borrowed–with acknowledgement–from Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933), a turn-of-the-century writer who carved out a career largely in historical fiction but with a few excursions into the macabre. His book The King in Yellow (1895) is a loose collection of tales revolving around a weird play, the same King in Yellow as the book’s title. The contents of this play are never revealed, but their effects are hinted at in stories like “The Yellow Sign” and “The Mask”. The King in Yellow proved such a success it inspired, amongst others, a Raymond Chandler mystery “The King in Yellow”, about a boxer, and was parodied in G. K. Chesterton’s “The Blast of the Book”, in which Father Brown must prove a killer book is a fraud.
The purpose to which Lovecraft puts his elder books is two-fold. First off, as with Chambers, they serve as the human glimpses of a much larger cosmos, written by those men and women who have realized the big picture. Secondly, he uses them as a technique he borrowed from another Victorian writer, the ghost-story writer, M. R. James (1862-1936), who employed lists of bibliographica to act as a layer of respectability in an otherwise impossible scenario. James knew the human tendency to give credence when confronted by authoritative lists. Gaining the reader’s acceptance of the impossible is key to any fantastic story.
Read the rest:
Lovecraft used the Necronomicon years before he read Chambers (the first story to mention it was “The Hound”, written in 1922, and he learned that Chambers had written horror only when he was working on “Supernatural Horror in Literature”), so that is not where he got the idea.