Regarding Lovecraft: He's amazing, great, a gilded dark god who's infallibility and pure divinity are not to be questioned. But this book, really, had little to do with him.
Alhazred: Author of the Necronomicon by Donal Tyson, a brief review...
Warning: I'll try my very best, but this MAY contain some SPOILERS.
So, being a die-hard Lovecraft fan I'm always looking for a good compilation of his works. Any fan of a specific author(particularly of non-modern authors) can tell you this can indeed be a daunting challenge, and buying several books with duplicate stories can make you downright homicidal. Particularly with authors, like Lovecraft, who title all their stories with very similar names.
So, wandering in a Borders with not a care in my head, I ran into this book.
And almost died of glee.
The actual book: Not so good, akshuly. For those die-hard Lovecraft fans, it's worth a read. For those of you who instantly fell in love with the Mad Arab and want to read more(?) about him; definitely worth a read. For the passing Lovecraft fan? SKIP IT.
As a stand alone book, Alhazred definitely disappoints. Following the "creation" of Alhazred, and his subsequent adventures in the occult the plot twists and flails, never really becoming boring but never tying together to form a cohesive plot. The character is definitely a lovable one(If Sune from stormchild.com is my favorite rapist, then Alhazred must be my favorite cannibal), but the plot would have been better served by following his sometime-servant would-be-lover Martala.
As a follow-up for a Lovecraft fan, this book is... Interesting. Tyson's writing in no way resembles Lovecraft's, making the character that much harder to relate to THE Mad Arab. The book as a whole falls into distinct sections, each a few chapters long, and each involving some mythos or area Lovecraft wrote about. It vaguely reminds one of the worlds from a Mario game; encountered once, destroyed, then promptly forgotten for the Next Big Thing.
Tec-Talk: Yeah, here follows the fun-facts and god-dropping in case another Lovecraft fan wants to chew on it a bit, plus spoilers g(al)ore/... Nyaralathotep is the prevalent god of the book, becoming a sort of patron saint of Alhazred. Despite his "vigilant" guard, Alhazred is threatened/killed by several other "gods" including Yog-Sothoth and one pint-sized cthulhu. Even Houdini's Sphinx-Worshipers are encountered, weather you like them or not. On the whole, though, the dark gods, Elders, Old ones, all of them, fall flat. Only ONE encounter in the entire book smells of Lovecraft, a meeting with the Wisest Head of Babylon. It consists of about 30 pages(of 665) and is worth the price of the book, in my opinion.
Still, on the whole, I loved this book. In places, I laughed hysterically(once literally falling off the sofa in glee).
On a side note; Tyson has also released a sort or "read-along" companion to Alhazred, called(of course) the Necronomicon. It's definitely not as involved as the "real" Necronomicon, but it seems fun all the same. It ties in several occult genres, touching on christian demons which related to, but are not mentioned in, the book. I thought that was SO effing cool.
Anyway, there's your review. Anyone else read it? Have anything to add?
