Pete's Necronomicon

I created my own copy of the Necronomicon for a play called Evil Dead: Live! While the Sam Raimi "Evil Dead" series of films did have their own version of this blasphemous (and fictional) book, I chose to base my version of the Necronomicon more on the works of it's inventor, Howard Philips Lovecraft, a pulp-fiction and fantastic horror writer from the 1930's

H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft was influential to most of the twentieth century's writers of horror and fantastic fiction, including Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Hellboy creator Mike Mignolia. His father died in a sanitarium before he was 6, and his mother died in the same sanitarium when he was 31.  He suffered from a medical condition which made his flesh perpetually cold to the touch.  Although he was an extremely prolific writer of supernatural horror, he himself did not believe in the supernatural at all.  His most famous creation, Cthulhu, who lies dead but dreaming beneath the waves in the sunken city of Rl'yeh, was a primary source of weird illustrations for my Necronomicon:

Lovecraft's Drawing               My rendition of Cthulhu

For the text of my Necronomicon, I chose a font lifted from the Voynich Manuscript, the "World's Most Mysterious Manuscript".  Fonts are available here, and I simply applied the font to existing pieces of text, specifically old Robert E. Howard "Conan" stories. One of the pages also features a transliteration of "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron.  Margin notes for the book were done in the same fashion, using english phrases and names from Lovecraft, transliterated into Hebrew, Arabic, and Hieroglyphic fonts.

The Voynich MS            "Conan" text transliterated

Various phrases transliterated into Arabic, Cuneform, Elvish, etc... 

Pages from my Necronomicon:

I found many good tips for constructing the Necronomicon here. The cover was made from pleather stretched over a blank journal hardcover, with clay pieces from a mold of my face underneath for topography.  The pages were stained with coffee, baked in the oven, and then hand-lettered with a caligraphic scribe-pen.  To remove the smell of baked-in coffee, I sealed the finished book in a container with a burning stick of inscense.  I also burned some edges and tore a few to give the pages a more weathered feel.

I hope you enjoyed this page, and I leave you with a final warning from H.P. Lovecraft, for any who would attempt to plumb the depths of this eldritch tome of blasphemous antiquity:

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

and with strange aeons even Death my die!"

-Abdul Alhazred

(Fictional writer of the Necronomicon and childhood self-pseudonym for Lovecraft himself)

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