The Book

This day, my colleagues and I shall partake in a curious masquerade, an act of homage, perhaps tinged with the faintest echo of sympathetic magic. In honor of our esteemed compatriot D, whose mortal labors shall cease with her retirement come the dawning of 2026, we have resolved to assume her likeness for our office’s Halloween observance. Thus shall we adorn ourselves in black, curling wigs, each lock a mimicry of her own luxuriant tresses, and array our forms in her customary vestments: the crimson polo, the sable jeans, and the black sneakers that have long marked her earthly passage through the sterile corridors of our shared toil.

I admit, this guise is not one I would have chosen willingly, for its familiarity borders upon the uncanny; yet in the shadow of her departure, there is an unspoken reverence in donning another’s semblance, as though we flirt with the boundary between the self and the other.

And so, in this spirit of imitation and impending absence, let us turn our gaze upon today’s dreadful reading, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Book.”

“The Book” is a fragment born in the twilight of H. P. Lovecraft’s creative years, written in the waning months of 1933 and brought to light only after his passing in the pages of Leaves. Within its few surviving lines, a nameless seeker receives from a furtive bookseller a volume of ancient and baleful aspect. Upon studying its cryptic pages, he awakens forces that slumbered beyond mortal reckoning, and the shadow of an unseen presence begins to stir.

In a letter from that same year, Lovecraft lamented a paralysis of the imagination and spoke of countless experiments destroyed in dissatisfaction. Scholars whisper that “The Book” escaped the pyre of his self-judgment, perhaps serving as his attempt to transmute the verse of Fungi from Yuggoth into the darker music of prose, mirroring its first three sonnets.

Years later, Martin S. Warnes sought to complete the fragment beneath the title “The Black Tome of Alsophocus”, in which the dread messenger Nyarlathotep takes possession of a doomed soul. This vision returned to mortal sight in a short film of 2019, later shown at the 2020 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival and preserved among its Best of 2020 collection, where the echo of that blasphemous tome still seems to whisper through the reel’s faint crackle and shadowed light.