L'histoire du Necronomicon: La collection HP Lovecraft

Écrit par Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Raconté par Patrick Blandin

Court texte écrit par H. P. Lovecraft en 1927, et publié en 1938, un an après sa mort. Il décrit les origines du grimoire occulte imaginaire appelé Necronomicon, un outil littéraire de Lovecraft désormais célèbre. Le texte prétend être véridique, ajoutant pour l'apparence de « pseudo-authenticité » que Lovecraft l'a utilisé pour la construction de son mythe de Cthulhu. Le texte raconte comment le Necronomicon aurait été rédigé par l'Arabe fou Abdul al-Hazred sous le titre Al-Azif. Al-Hazred serait mort après avoir été dévoré par des démons invisibles devant une foule terrifiée. Son travail est ensuite dissimulé mais survit néanmoins. Aucune copie arabe originale ne subsiste, ni aucune traduction grecque. Seules cinq traductions du grec au latin (rebaptisées Necronomicon) sont conservées dans des bibliothèques (le British Museum, la Bibliothèque nationale de France, l'université de Buenos Aires, la bibliothèque Widener à Harvard, et l'université de Miskatonic), bien qu'il existe des copies dans des collections privées.

• Langue: Français
• Éditeur: Compagnie Du Savoir
• Date de sortie: 9 sept. 2022
• ISBN: 9782821188136

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American author of science fiction and horror stories. Born in Providence, Rhode Island to a wealthy family, he suffered the loss of his father at a young age. Raised with his mother’s family, he was doted upon throughout his youth and found a paternal figure in his grandfather Whipple, who encouraged his literary interests. He began writing stories and poems inspired by the classics and by Whipple’s spirited retellings of Gothic tales of terror. In 1902, he began publishing a periodical on astronomy, a source of intellectual fascination for the young Lovecraft. Over the next several years, he would suffer from a series of illnesses that made it nearly impossible to attend school. Exacerbated by the decline of his family’s financial stability, this decade would prove formative to Lovecraft’s worldview and writing style, both of which depict humanity as cosmologically insignificant. Supported by his mother Susie in his attempts to study organic chemistry, Lovecraft eventually devoted himself to writing poems and stories for such pulp and weird-fiction magazines as Argosy, where he gained a cult following of readers. Early stories of note include “The Alchemist” (1916), “The Tomb” (1917), and “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919). “The Call of Cthulu,” originally published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, is considered by many scholars and fellow writers to be his finest, most complex work of fiction. Inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft became one of the century’s leading horror writers whose influence remains essential to the genre.