The Leaves of a Necronomicon

by Joseph S. Pulver Sr. (Editor)

The Necronomicon. For centuries, scholars of the occult have sought out the darkly fabled tome, hoping to gain insight into the secret workings of the universe-or unbridled power. Instead, the book rewards their pursuit with madness and devastation.

Under the guidance of Shirley Jackson Award-winning editor Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., The Leaves of a Necronomicon traces the impact of a single copy of the mysterious work on its owners and those around them as it passes from hand to hand across the decades.

The history is told in braided novel form, with chapters contributed by a gathering of outstanding horror and dark fantasy authors, including S. P. Miskowski, Michael Cisco, Damien Angelica Walters, Nick Mamatas, Anna Tambour, and Jeffrey Thomas.

Table of

From Hand to Hand . . . to Hand- by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
Chapter 1: The Bookmaker by Nate Pedersen
Chapter 2: The Collector of Rare Editions by Donald Tyson
Chapter 3: Down to a Sunless Sea by Allyson Bird
Chapter 4: Dawn Watch by Daniel Mills
Chapter 5: Liquor City by Nick Mamatas
In Waves by S. P. Miskowski
Chapter 6: Eyes on Fire by Cody Goodfellow
Chapter 7: Horrors Worse than Hell by Robert M. Price
Chapter 8: Laying the Words by Don Webb
Mysteries Don't Sleep by Anna Tambour
Chapter 9: The Sun Saw by Mike Allen
Chapter 10: American Ghost by John Claude Smith
Chapter 11: Flickering I Roam by E. Catherine Tobler
Chapter 12: Sewn into Pieces, Stitched into Place by Damien Angelica Walters
Chapter 13: Too Many Pages by Simon Strantzas
Chapter 14: 11:00 by Nikki Guerlain
Chapter 15: Void Kiss by Michael Cisco
Letter Found Sitting atop a Rare Old Handbook of Dark Portent by Anna Tambour
Chapter 16: And I Watered It in Fears by Sunny Moraine
Chapter 17: Miles and Kathrine at the Crimson by Michael Griffin
Chapter 18: Passages for the Dying and the Dead by S. P. Miskowski
Chapter 19: Ménage à Trois by Ross E. Lockhart
Chapter 20: The Persuader by Jeffrey Thomas
Over the Moon by Anna Tambour

Genres: Horror

256 pages, Paperback

Published October 30, 2022

Reviews

[E Kummeneje · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange and fascinating and incredibly diverse collection.

Ranges from classical HPL style "horror" via weird drama and vaguely disturbing poetry (?) to some seriously messed up body horror madness. This is a book where you never know what you'll get next chapter. A slow, quiet story about a father reminiscing about his lost son after WW1? A two-fisted pulp showdown with Cthulhu cultist Frank Sinatra? Lots and lots of sex? Almost all the stories feature a descent into madness of some kind, and the book is there in some way, but other than that they are an extremely wide spectrum of "horror".

You also won't know if the next story will be connected. Towards the end of the book, a long string of stories are very tightly interwoven, but earlier on the stories seem entirely disconnected. This seems a bit of an odd choice to me, but perhaps I'm biased since the interlinked stories were among my least favorite.

A few of the stories, maybe two or three, I loved and will stay with me. The majority were "ok".

The ones I disliked were mostly due to the language. The metaphors and imagery hang so dense in some of these stories I was struggling mightily to figure out what, if anything, was actually going on. Especially here "Flickering I Roam" where I just kinda gave up. The short interludes that are mostly pure allusions also gave me little. The garish spectre of pretentiousness hangs low over some of these creations, I feel. But, let it be said, they all somehow fit into a whole. Less certain of that I am about the later stories where 3-4 in rapid succession feature wild sex and sex drive as a main plot point. Why are these stories only at the end, near our own time? Why isn't there a single mention of sex drive as a force of madness before we suddenly get this rush? Meh, I mostly found it silly. One last thing I feel compelled to mention in this "not like" section is the unceasing Americana of the whole thing. As a Scandinavian I frequently felt alienated by the extreme americanness of the lived experiences, especially as we move into the modern age. Everyone is a stranger in a strange land, making their own way. No-one helps or can find help. Well, that's the main public I guess.

So, this might seem like a lot of negatives, and yeah there are. As I said, in a book of 20 tales, I love 3. But all in all this insane experiment still feels very valid. I love that people try to make stuff like this. I'm very happy that this whole book exists, and I'll recommend it to anyone looking for a very fresh and modern take on HPLs legacy.

My favorites:
The Sun Saw by Mike Allen, a phantasmogorical rollercoaster ride through body horror
Horrors Worse Than Hell by Robert M. Price, a classical Cthulhu tale told in an inventive framework
The Persuader by Jeffrey Thomas, a tale of integration gone terribly wrong

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not usually a big short story reader, so this is from a fairly small population, but The Leaves from a Necronomicon is undoubtedly the best short story collection I have ever read. Part of this is the topic - I'm a sucker for Weird Tales, and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. I'm also a bibliophile and appreciate good craftsmanship on a shelf. This book ticks off all those boxes.

One of the reasons this book works so well is it takes full advantage of the myriad perspectives that come from being penned by twenty-some different authors. Sometimes a following chapter fits hand-in-glove with the one that comes before it; sometimes, the connection is harder to see or late in the story, and sometimes it's a pretty hard break from one story to another. Still, this Necronomicon gets around, and this compilation traces its history from printing to an unknown date that seems very 2020s. It appears that the editor/project coordinator threw a few crumbs at each author - use this or that character, mention this person - to knit together an overarching narrative, or each author may have read the story before it. Or maybe something else. However it came together, the result is suitably confusing, non-linear, creepy, and horrible to be a compelling history of a particular copy of the terrible tome.

One bit of warning - this is a book intended for adults. Most of the not-safe-for-work moments happen off-page, but not all of them. Sometimes the language is strong, sometimes it's just so very creepy, and there is plenty of hate and horror, sex and violence between these pages. That didn't detract from my enjoyment, but it's worth mentioning.

For those who like expansions of the wide world of the Cthulhu Mythos, those who love a good story about a positively horrible and dangerous book and the horrible and dangerous people who have owned it, for those who love a Lovecraftian tale, Leaves will be a page-turner, just as it was for me.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's only so many interesting stories you can have in a single book where a character looked at/accidentally read/touched the Necronomicon and it drove them crazy and/or killed them and/or turned them into a murderer. Though I guess the one where it turns out that Jim Morrison faked his own death after the book turned him into a human-sized reptile that eats protagonists (a "lizard king") was original, if not necessarily any good.

[Barbara Cottrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the concept that unites these short stories-tracking a copy of The Necronomicon as it moves through various owners. Of course, "owners" is a misleading term. The book owns you, not the other way around! The stories were hit and miss, but watching the "history" of this forbidden tome was fascinating. It gave me ideas for my own work in the Lovecraftian world...

[Arthur B · Rating 2 out of 5]

High-concept endeavour which doesn't really work. Not enough of the chapters stand on their own as solid self-contained stories to treat it as a short story collection, and there's enough discontinuities to make it hard to accept as a novel. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...

[Carlos]

An interesting idea by the late Joe Pulver in tracing a copy of the Necronomicon down the ages. As appealing as the concept is, I'm not exactly sure it could work. Additionally, suffers from the hit-and-miss nature common to anthologies.

[Queen Elsa]

I really love the idea of this anthology but the execution not so much. Some of the stories are good of course. I enjoyed the first two in particular but so many of them seem to barely feature the central book of the story, or any horror at all for that matter. It’s like some of the authors weren’t told anything before hand and wrote general fiction stories before realising they had to shoe horn the Necronomicon into the last 15% of the story.

It’s as though some of the authors wrote their stories independently of each other and I think that’s a substantial failing. Since we’re following The Necromicon as it’s passed from person to person, it’s pretty disappointing when a story doesn’t seem to have any connection to the previous one. Some of the stories do build on the previous ones and I appreciate that some of the authors put some effort into creating some sense of cohesion. What little narrative we do get comes to a lacklustre ending, as the cursed book meets its end at the hands of a misogynist helicopter parent.

Ultimately I think that this anthology should have had way fewer but longer stories.

Also why did the publisher see the need to include a chapter of quotes by the editor? They just felt like reading a random collection of unexceptional Twitter posts.

[Phil On The Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting concept for a book with a variety of stories. The collected stories follow the history of a particular copy of the evil tome. Some I enjoyed and some I struggled with a bit.