As is the often case with the dubious category of fame called "cult status," the stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft achieved notoriety through a mixture of die-hard evangelism and light hearted pranksterism. The "unmentionable" Necronomicon, which was his most visceral fictional creation, grew in fame along with the stories in which it appeared, though it would eventually outstrip them all in its cultural impact.
On one hand, writers like August Derleth and Clark Ashton Smith championed Lovecraft's work, and his current status in the pantheon of American horror, alongside the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce is due in no small part to their efforts.
But, part of the credit belongs to the lighthearted hoax perpetrators who met Lovecraft halfway between fiction and reality. As if to complement the Providencian innovative use of journalistic style, fans began to populate the real world with signs and signifiers from his body of work, blurring the joins between fiction and fact like graphic designers using Photoshop to slip a walking corpse into the background shadows of a mundane family portrait. Libraries in particular were a target. The Widener Library at Harvard University, one of the only five libraries, according to Lovecraft's fiction, to possess a copy of the proscribed and hideous text, was plagued by a long line of of false Necronomicon card-catalogue entries. Other libraries suffered similar practical jokery at the hands of Lovecraft fans. The University Library of Tromso, Norway similarly lists a Necronomicon (translated by a Petrus De Dacia) that is unsurprisingly "currently unavailable."
In 1973, the veil thinned a little further: Owlswick Press issued a book, in an edition of 348 copies, which they called "The Necronomicon." It was written in an incomprehensible and clearly made up language, referred to as "Duriac," which resembled a sort of non-sense Arabic.
But the dam really broke in 1977 with the publication of the so-called "Simon Necronomicon," named after the unknown "Simon" to whom it is attributed. This Necronomicon has almost nothing to do with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and is largely influenced by Sumerian mythology (even elaborating spells based on the "fifty names of Marduk.") The identity of "Simon," (clearly a reference to the wizard who was shamed and revealed as a fraud by Jesus in the Bible) is a controversy of its own. Among the likely lads are Anton Lavey, infamous founder, high priest, and organist extrordinaire of the Church Of Satan (not to mention being the man with the dubious distinction of having intellectually crossbred Aleister Crowley with Ayn Rand) James Wasserman, protege of Sam Weiser (the largest occult book publisher in the USA) and, bizarrely, Sandy Pearlman, manager of Blue Oyster Cult.
Yeah, that Blue Oyster Cult. And on that note, it's clearly time for bed.
TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW!
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