Let's clear one thing up right off the bat - Lovecraft's Necronomicon does not exist, not in a physical sense at least. It may have reality on a higher plane, where Lovecraft glimpsed it during his dreams, but it was never published between two covers in this world. Not until the latter part of the 20th century, when the urge to make it a real book that could be held in the hands and read became too compelling for writers to deny.
When I studied several of the versions of the Necronomicon that had been written by others, I was not impressed. They were obscure, tedious, and simplistic. I asked myself the question, if the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, really had written a book of forbidden lore at the start of the 8th century, as Lovecraft claimed in his fictional publishing history for the book, what would it most likely have been about? What form would it have taken? What would have been its contents?
My strong sense was that it would not have been merely a grimoire of incantations, sigils and descriptions of demons. The quotations from the book provided by Lovecraft in some of his stories suggest as much. The material Lovecraft quotes is more narrative than might be expected from the average grimoire.
Alhazred was described by Lovecraft as a wanderer, and presumably it would have been during this wandering that he acquired a large portion of the forbidden knowledge that he wrote about. This line of thinking led me to conclude that the Necronomicon, had it existed, would in all likelihood have taken the form of a kind of travel book of strange places and exotic creatures.
Such travel books were common in the ancient world, and several of them have survived, the most famous being the Guide to Greece by Pausanias. In them, factual information about distant cities, lost temples, and mysterious races were seamlessly mingled with fabulous monsters and impossible events. Often it is difficult for the modern reader to tell what is fact and what is fantasy.
There was another kind of book popular in the time of Alhazred, known as a book of wonders. It consisted of a loose collection of spells, charms, alchemical tricks, herbal lore, home remedies, mineralogy, and descriptions of mythical monsters. It was an early and very crude form of encyclopedia, its content chosen for its ability to amaze the reader. One of the best known is the Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus.
When I wrote my own version of the Necronomicon I crafted it to resemble a cross between these two popular literary forms - a travel book of the ancient world, and a medieval book of wonders. According to Lovecraft, when Alhazred was an old man he set pen to parchment and recorded the strange events of his youthful wanderings across the great Arabian desert known as the Empty Space, and his journeys to more distant lands such as Egypt and Persia. He described the forbidden knowledge he had acquired along the way in musty tombs and deep caves, from things not quite human, knowledge about the history of the Old Ones, and about the practical workings of necromancy. As punishment for allowing his book to become public, he was caught up into the air by an invisible demon in the year 738 and devoured piece by piece before the horrified gaze of the people of Damascus.
One of my concerns in attempting to recreate the Necronomicon was that it be accurate in so far as the statements about it made by Lovecraft himself were concerned. I took great pains in my text not to contradict anything Lovecraft had ever written about the Necronomicon. I was less worried about the writings of other authors who have based their work on what is generally known as the Cthulhu Mythos, because I considered it an impossible task to reconcile the comments made by so many writers. All of Lovecraft's quotations from the Necronomicon appear in my book, in somewhat modified form - it is, after all, supposed to be a different translation that that made by Lovecraft.
Even though it was not my primary purpose to compose a grimoire, there is in my book a great deal of practical magic, along with much lore concerning the Old Ones and other alien races described by Lovecraft in his stories and alluded to in his Necronomicon quotations.
My book does something no other version of the Necronomicon even attempts - it gives life to Abdul Alhazred, mad poet of Yemen who wandered the Empty Space in his youth, listening to the voices of spirits hidden within the drone of insects and the sighing of the desert winds. It follows him as he explores places time has forgotten, and holds conversations with inhuman creatures the very existence of which no other man ever knew.
After my Necronomicon was published, I wrote a novel about the wandering of Alhazred's early life, as told in his own words while still a young man. It covers from a different perspective and in greater personal detail the events mentioned in the Necronomicon. The Necronomicon was written to stand on its own merits, but it can be enjoyed most completely if read in concert with my novel Alhazred, which is described elsewhere on this site.
ISBN:0-7387-0627-2. Price: $17.95 US. Llewellyn, 2004.