"necronomicon-FAQ" - читать интересную книгу автора (Call of Cthulhu RPG)

Kendrick Kerwin Chua
22 March 1993
Servant of the Dark Lord, and keeper of the decade.


FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
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[Note: Text within [brackets] indicate text which would normally be placed
in a footnote or a bibliography. However, since this FAQ is most likely
going to be read as a text file on some newsreader, footnotes are
unwieldly in the extreme. Therefore, all such information will be
bracketed and indented like so. Read them or ignore them. KKC]


(1) What is the Necronomicon?

A question not answered easily, quickly, or with any level of assurance.
If we may begin at what seems to be the beginning, we will also answer
the question:

(1a) Who is H.P. Lovecraft?

In the early 1900's, a man by the name of Howard Phillips Lovecraft
lived in New England and struggled with an unsuccessful career as a
writer. Living as a bachelor and a recluse most of his life, he tried
various occupations, journalism, literary criticism, and editing among
them. He finally came upon an enjoyable form of composition, writing
horror fiction. Like his hero, Edgar Allen Poe, Lovecraft dreamed of
creating worlds of wonder and mystery, and is credited with the creation
of the modern mystery format by his student, Robert Bloch, the author of
_Psycho_. While Lovecraft published much of his work, most notably in
the magazine "Weird Tales", he died with no critical acclaim, and little
recognition by the public. It was much later, after World War II and
into our decade, that Lovecraft began to receive the publicity that he
deserved as a literary figure. Lovecraft is now noted as the logical
successor to Poe, and served as the inspiration for many modern horror
authors, including Steven King.

[(1) Most information from Willis Conover's biography of Lovecraft
entitled _Lovecraft at Last_. Published by Carrollton-Clark in 1975 in
Arlington, Virginia. ISBN 0-915490-02-1. Conover was a publisher who
corresponded with Lovecraft during the height of his writing and
during his years of illness before he died. KKC]

What made Lovecraft's works different from other pulp fiction was his
method of "legitimizing" the stories he told. Devoid of gratuitous
splatter violence or adolescent foolishness, Lovecraft mixed ancient
mythology and occult literature by real authors with books and
theologies of his own devising. He did this so well that in many short
stories, one cannot tell the difference between the two without a