Book of the Dead

Author’s Notes

Many readers ask me about the background of my novels — is it real or fiction? Where do I get the situations, equipment, characters or their expertise from, and just how much of any legend has a basis in fact? In the case of Book of the Dead, there is one absolute reality — its real creator: the American author Howard Phillips “H.P.” Lovecraft.

My book, most of the creatures described, and even my hero being a professor in search of science and knowledge, are drawn from Lovecraft’s mythos universe.

This book is where I pay homage to the man. I hope he would have approved.

Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20 1890. Today, he is considered one of the most influential fathers of monstrous and macabre horror, though it was only years after his death that he received the recognition he and his work deserved.

A young Lovecraft spent his early life being cosseted by an overprotective mother, as his father was confined to a mental institution. His grandfather turned out to be a significant influence, as much of the time he was with Howard was spent telling him fantastic make-believe stories, and this soon became their favorite pastime.

It wasn’t long before an eight-year-old Lovecraft began composing his own rudimentary horror tales. Then later, when in high school, he began to involve local children in elaborate fantasy play-acting, only stopping the projects just prior to his eighteenth birthday. At school, Lovecraft abhorred many of the traditional subjects, but developed a keen interest in history, linguistics, chemistry, and astronomy, and obtained a deep understanding and knowledge of each of these. Though his intellect was being honed, his lack of interest in traditional topics led to him failing to graduate.

Lovecraft began to withdraw from the world, and soon was living a near nocturnal lifestyle. However, his writing, if mostly just personal, continued. At twenty-three, his literary flair was seen in the letter pages of a story magazine and he was soon invited to join an amateur journalism association. This was the trigger he needed and he soon began to send out more of his works. At the age of thirty-one he had his first formal publication in a professional magazine.

Lovecraft’s life seemed to be thrown open then — he lived in New York, married an older woman he had met at one of his journalism conferences, and, by thirty-four, was a regular contributor to a new fiction magazine called Weird Tales.

Lovecraft returned to his home in Providence in 1926, and over the next year he produced some of his most fantastic works, including “The Call of Cthulhu” (first published in Weird Tales in 1928), which was the authoritative basis for the Cthulhu Mythos, so named by a contemporary author by the name of August Derleth.

A recurring theme in Lovecraft’s work is the utter unimportance of us, humankind, when faced with the true horrors that live in the Old Ones’ universe. Lovecraft made many references to these Elder Gods and Great Old Ones, who were described as a race of ancient, powerful deities from the cosmos who once ruled the Earth long before humanity’s oldest ancestors had even crawled from the ooze. These titanic monstrosities are now in a deathlike sleep, hibernating, but still reaching out to us. This reaching out was first spoken of in “The Call of Cthulhu”, in which the humans were sent mad when they even had a glimpse of what exists in this shared universe.

Sadly for H.P. Lovecraft, fame and fortune eluded him and he was never properly able to support himself as an author. Once again he began to withdraw from the world, and as he never promoted his own work, many of his pieces were left unappreciated, unsold, and unread for decades. With his inheritance completely spent, in continuing ill health, and deeply troubled, he died at the age of forty-six. Today, he is regarded as one of the most significant twentieth-century authors in his genre, and a genius well beyond his years.

H.P. Lovecraft’s literary gifts to us remain vibrant to this day, and his influence has been remarked upon by authors such as Stephen King, Clive Barker, Joe R. Lansdale, Neil Gaiman, F. Paul Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, and Brian Lumley. All have cited Lovecraft as one of their primary influences.

As do I, in this book, Book of the Dead.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old One and monstrous god from the Below. Lovecraft gave several pronunciations for the name, but his favored version was “Khlûl’-hloo” — the first syllable “Khlûl” is pronounced gutturally and harshly. So try: “Klul-loo’. However, the pronunciation has changed, and today it is more common to hear it pronounced as “Kə-thoo-loo”.

After “The Call of Cthulhu”, Lovecraft’s evil deity went on to be featured in numerous popular culture references, from books and movies to online games.

In “The Call of Cthulhu”, H.P. Lovecraft describes the Cthulhu as follows:

• A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers; a scaly, rubbery-looking body; prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.

• A mix between a giant human, an octopus, and a dragon, depicted as being hundreds of feet tall, with human-looking arms and legs and a pair of rudimentary wings on its back.

• Similar to the entirety of a giant octopus, with an unknown number of tentacles surrounding its supposed mouth, able to change the shape of its body at will, extending and retracting limbs and tentacles as it sees fit.

The Shoggoth were first described in Lovecraft’s 1931 Antarctic adventure novella, At the Mountains of Madness. (Note: that was one of my own influences for Beneath the Dark Ice.)

In the story, Lovecraft describes them as huge amoeba-like creatures made out of glistening black ooze, with multiple eyes that formed and popped open all over their surface. These eyes could float freely over the lumpen body mass. In another description, they are said to lack any formal or base body shape and instead could produce limbs, eyes and mouths at will (if you have ever seen John Carpenter’s movie The Thing you’ll get an idea of the influence Lovecraft had on this film director’s work).

The character of the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, found the mere idea of their existence on Earth to be horrifying enough to drive a person to insanity.

R’lyeh is a fictional lost city that first appeared in “The Call of Cthulhu”. R’lyeh is sunken deep under the Pacific Ocean. Lovecraft put the coordinates at approximately Latitude 47° 9′ S, Longitude 126° 43′ W. The water there is impenetrably deep, and warm.

In 1997 Navy sensors detected a very large noise, picked up on two different marine sensors thousands of miles apart, being produced at Latitude 50° S, Longitude 120° W, close to Lovecraft’s R’lyeh. This sound (known as a Bloop) is not thought to correspond to any known living or non-living source.

To this day, the phenomenon is still unexplained, and no agreed or adequate explanation has ever been provided.

Secrets and knowledge that are buried, sunken, long forgotten or forbidden, is a recurring theme in Lovecraft’s works. Many of his characters (usually scientists or professors) are driven by curiosity or scientific endeavor, and in many of his stories what they uncover in their searches usually proves to be a Pandora’s Box, with the secrets they reveal (release?) usually destroying their discoverers both physically and mentally.

The creatures of Lovecraft’s universe will often have humans who act as servants. Cthulhu, for instance, is worshiped as a god by many secret cults in both the Western world and among the Greenland Eskimo (Inuit) and the voodoo covens of Louisiana.

Lovecraft was like many of his turn of the twentieth century contemporaries, in that he saw modern man as being closer to science and rigid thinking, and the indigenous natives as being closer to the spiritual-supernatural knowledge unknown to civilized man. This closeness to the natural world was what he saw as making the “savages” the keepers of the ancient (and long forgotten in the modern world) lore.

The university where Matt Kearns finally deposits the Book first appeared in Lovecraft’s 1922 story “Herbert West — Reanimator”. It is a fictional university located in Arkham, a made-up town in Essex County, Massachusetts. It is named after the Miskatonic River (also made up).

Miskatonic University was supposedly known for its fantastic library collection of ancient occult books. The Miskatonic library also holds one of the very few surviving copies of The Necronomicon. But this wasn’t the only fantastic tome it held locked away in its vaults. It was also said to include the mysterious Book of Eibon — that strangest and rarest of occult volumes that was said to have come down through a series of translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.

And now it contains the original Al Azif as well. It is locked away in its deep vault; hopefully it’ll be there when next we need it!