Tomes of evil do not begin or end with H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous volume, The Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. His friends like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth and others created their own evil books, giving us a library full of terrors. Reading a copy of The Pnakotic Manuscripts, Cultes de Ghoules or Nameless Cults won’t blast you or drive you immediately insane. (That being said, the poor protagonists who discover their evil uncle’s cache of books usually end up dead or insane.) The books in the stories here are another thing altogether. These books kill. The early ones inspired H. P. Lovecraft (or were inspired by the same authors who inspired him) and the later ones followed the Old Gentleman from Providence’s lead.
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895) is a collection of stories centered around a legendary play called “The King in Yellow”. Anyone who reads this play experiences a terrible cosmic shock and goes mad or dies. Chambers’ initial fame rests on this collection (especially “The Yellow Sign”) before he launched a career of romance and history tales. The idea of a “killer book” begins with him, not Lovecraft. Even Raymond Chandler used the name of the book for his own “The King in Yellow” (Dime Detective, March 1938) about a musician named King Leonardi, a horn-player who dresses in yellow satin. But Chambers’ influence didn’t end with Lovecraft and Chandler in the Pulp era. Today anthologies devoted to Chambers are being published such as In the Court of the Yellow King (2014) edited by Glynn Owen Barrass.
“The Hound” (Weird Tales, February 1924) was the first story by Lovecraft to name The Necronomicon specifically:
…Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognised it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.
The plot is an M. R. James style story based on “Count Magnus”. Two men meddling with things best left alone get a strange phantom hound after them. I wrote about “The Hound” and other demon dogs previously here.
“The Book” by Margaret Irwin (The London Mercury, September 1930) was reprinted more than forty times in three languages. It was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1951. The story follows Mr. Corbett (who is never given a first name, just Mr. Corbett.) The father of a family, he is drawn to the second shelf of the bookshelf that fills gaps in its contents as if by ghostly hands. He discovers a hand-written manuscript in Latin, that allows him to prosper in business, as long as he always follows the newly appearing final sentence of the book. When the family dog, Mike, barks at him, the book tells him to kill the animal. His attempt to do so with poison is thwarted by his daughter, Jeannie. The book finally commands him to kill her. In a last moment of love, Corbett throws the book into the fire. The next morning the maid finds him strangled as if by a monstrous hand.
Irwin does a great job of showing the book’s influence over the poor man. While under its spell, he feels superior to his fellow humans, and above the law. He senses that he is going down a terrible path but can’t help himself. Only his love for his daughter is strong enough to defeat the book’s spell. This idea is the foundation of the Amityville Horror franchise but Irwin does it better.
“The Blast of the Book” by G. K. Chesterton (Liberty, August 26, 1933) was collected in The Scandal of Father Brown (1935) Father Brown hears about a book that is so evil, if you open it, it will kill you. After almost forty years since Chambers’ tale, Chesterton could rely on his readers getting the reference. Professor Openshaw is a psychic researcher who has no tolerance for fake mediums or materialists. Openshaw isn’t interested in the appearance of ghosts but the disappearances of men and women. He gets a line on the book from a Reverend Pringle who was in the jungle, who got it from a Dr. Mankey. The Reverend brings the book to Opernshaw and Father Brown. The Professor’s clerk disappears like the others who have been blasted by the book and then the Reverend.
Father Brother explains what has really happened to the confused researcher. The whole thing is a joke perpetrated by Openshaw’s clerk, who resents being treated as an invisible slave. Brown knows the book is a fake filled with blank pages. Because he opened it himself while nobody was looking. I suspect Chesterton is taking a poke at Arthur Conan Doyle and his beliefs in Spiritualism. There is a bit about fairies that might refer to Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies (1920). I have written specifically about this story and its Mythos connections here.
“The Terrible Parchment” by Manly Wade Wellman (Weird Tales, August 1937), was a tale written in memory of H. P. Lovecraft who had died on March 15, 1937. Many authors from Weird Tales wrote poems, letters and tales in his honor.The story is a first person narration about getting a mysterious copy of Weird Tales that contains a strange sheet of parchment in it. The page is soft and pliable like flesh and has only one goal, to get those that see it to read the incantation that will free Chthulhu (Manly’s spelling) and the other Great Old Ones. The parchment does this by translating itself from Latin into English, then by presenting the spell in large, bold print.
The narrator and his wife, Gwen, don’t take the page seriously but as it tries again and again to make them read the lines, the terror builds. In the end they trap it in a waste paper basket and their local priest destroys it with holy water. The triumph of Christianity is a most un-Lovecraftian thing to do, but Wellman’s ghostbreakers are all good Christians. Manly was not part of Lovecraft’s circle, despite being popular at WT, but he honored the Old Man with this tale, mentioning other writers like Otis Adelbert Kline. Manly belonged to another group that I have called the Ghostbreakers’ Mythos.
“The Adder” by Fred Chappell (Deathrealm, Summer 1989) has a book seller with an Uncle Alvin in the same trade. Alvin asks a special favor, to keep a copy of the Necronomicon for a week, while he negotiates with the Library of Congress in Washington. He calls the book The Adder:
I gave him a look that I intended to mean: not another one of your little jokes, Uncle Alvin. “You don’ really expect me to believe that we’ve got a book that eats people.”
“Oh no.” He shook his head. “It only eats its own kind.”
This proves to be the poetry of Milton, as the nephew lays a poor copy of Milton’s work on top of the hidden manuscript. Later he finds Milton’s words being warped and twisted, and finally destroyed altogether.
Uncle Alvin returns the next Sunday. His nephew is panicking as Milton is ripped from the world. (He knows because he calls friends in distant cities to confirm.) Alvin knows how to reverse the problem. This isn’t the first time. All the Cthulhu Mythos writers had their work absorbed then reversed. Lovecraft many times. The uncle places an unnamed holy book (not the Bible) in with the Necronomicon until the works of Milton return. Unfortunately, the nephew allowed a fly to land on the pages, and it has taken some of the ink. The two men run outside to find the fly, but the insect is long gone.
The last chilling line:
But out there in the sleepy southern Sunday morning would be countless indistinguishable green flies, feeding, excreting and mating.
Chappell has taken a page from Wellman (pun intended!) His Necronomicon is so evil that if left with money it would cause economic collapse. Unlike Wellman, the manuscript doesn’t require anyone to even read it. It can cause evil simply by proximity.
Conclusion
I created my own strange tome for The Book Collector series. My nameless detective is always trying to find copies of The Book of the Black Sun, a weird metallic book from the future. The people who rent the volume from his boss, Telford, sometimes don’t like to return it. The Book Collector has twenty-four hours to get it back if he wants the cool million dollar fee. You won’t go instantly insane from reading The Book of the Black Sun but knowing things that have not yet come to pass may not be good for your health either.
Next time…Evil Tomes in Golden Age Comics…
