Will Murray’s “A Trillion Young” posits the unthinkable: what would happen if, through some mind-numbing idiocy of the modern generation, the Necronomicon were digitized and released into the internet, triggering ramification of literally global dimensions.Ī.C. As things turn out, Armitage is quite correct in his misgivings on the other hand, he does know a thing or two about the book that the would-be terrorists do not. In the wrong hands, the volume would be a horrific weapon. When Wilbur Armitage receives a request from a middle-eastern scholar to borrow the Necronomicon, he feels honor-bound to fill it, in spite of the current turmoil in the region and his misgivings about the courier sent to collect it. Harry Turtledove’s “Interlibrary Loan” is a cautionary tale emphasizing the near-sacred nature of interlibrary cooperation. And thus the trap is set.ĭirk Flinthart’s “To Be in Ulthar on a Summer Afternoon” is a marvelously light-tone piece detailing Bill Drake’s attempts to retrieve a copy of The Dream Journal of Arpan the Elder, overdue from the Special Collections of Miskatonic University and currently somewhere in the Dreamlands, where “not all dreams are desirable.” It is, in fact, a highly dangerous place but, well, the book is, after all, overdue. Unfortunately for Vermillion, he and his controllers, the Dark Army, are well known to Wormdark. Reading each part makes possible the fulfillment of the reader’s wildest dreams reading the final part leads to death.Īdrian Cole’s “The Third Movement” introduces the fantastically named Artavian Wormdark and his search for the infamous Malleus Tenebrarum at the request of a mysterious visitor known only as Vermillion. Price’s “The Bonfire of the Blasphemies.” Unlike many anthologies, in which one or two stories might not quite meet the standards set by the rest, Tales from the Miskatonic University Library is consistently entertaining and engaging.ĭon Webb’s “Slowly Ticking Time Bomb” concentrates on a typically deadly volume, the Ool Athog Chronicles, an esoteric book of spells in five parts, in which pages are sometime blank…and sometimes disappear altogether. This pitch-perfect tone begins with the opening paragraph of John Ashmead’s introduction, with its absolutely straight-faced account of his attempts to access the seventeenth-century copy of the Necronomicon purportedly held at Harvard’s Weidener Library and holds true through the ironic Biblical paraphrase that is the final line of Robert M. And in many senses, the absurd is closely akin to the horrific. They take it so seriously as to border perilously-but never gratuitously-on the absurd. Not that the stories do not take Lovecraft’s worldview seriously. Working from this premise, the editors have assembled the most appropriately comedic perspectives on Lovecraft and his horrors that I have ever read. Tales from the Miskatonic University Library is an anthology collecting two highly insightful introductions and thirteen stories (a lucky number, in this case) that touch in one way or another upon a rarely discussed topic in Lovecraftiana: Just how safe is the Special Collections section of that obscure university in the small town of Arkham, Massachusetts? After all, it contains some of the most dangerous volumes in the cosmos. Tales from the Miskatonic University Libraryĭarrell Schweitzer and John Ashmead, Editors