List of Cthulhu Mythos books
The main literary purpose of these works is to explain how characters within the tales come by occult or esoterica (knowledge that is unknown to the general populace).
For example, in Robert Bloch's tale "The Shambler from the Stars", characters inadvertently cast a spell from the arcane book De Vermis Mysteriis.
Thereafter, these fictional works and others appear in the stories of numerous other Mythos authors (some of whom have added their own grimoires to the literary arcana), including August Derleth, Lin Carter, Brian Lumley, Jonathan L. Howard, and Ramsey Campbell.
Glynn Owen Barrass states (in The Starry Wisdom Library) that the Book of Azathoth praises the Lovecraftian pantheon and renounces/mocks the Christian scripture.
The Book of Eibon, that strangest and rarest of occult forgotten volumes ... is said to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.
[3] Lin Carter wrote numerous 'completions' or imitations of Clark Ashton Smith stories which purported to be various sections of the Book of Eibon.
Outside of Smith's and Lovecraft's mythoses, the book notably appears in Lucio Fulci's supernatural horror film The Beyond (1981), where inappropriate use of it opened up one of the seven gates of Hell, allowing its zombie-like denizens to cross over.
[1] The Book of Iod was created by Henry Kuttner and first appeared in his short story "Bells of Horror" (as Keith Hammond; 1939).
According to the lore of the Cthulhu Mythos, the Huntington Library of San Marino, California is said to hold an expurgated translation, possibly in Latin, by Johann Negus.
[6] It is a book on black magic and the uses of the dead written by the character Francois-Honore Balfour (Comte d'Erlette) in 1702 of the lore's timeline.
Cultes des Goules is mentioned numerous times in the works of Caitlin R. Kiernan and plays an especially important role in her 2003 novel Low Red Moon.
Richard F. Searight invented The Eltdown Shards in a head-note (which purported to be a quotation from this text) to his story "The Sealed Casket" (Weird Tales, March 1935).
Nonetheless, several characters penned their own interpretations of the markings, including Gordon Whitney and his The Eltdown Shards: A Partial Translation.
They are described as a set of miraculously preserved shards of obsidian or some other black stone that record the history of the pre-human African city of G'harne.
The play is named after a mysterious supernatural figure featured in it, who is connected to a peculiar alien symbol, usually wrought in gold, called the Yellow Sign.
Its setting and events include mysterious places and entities such as Carcosa, Hastur, and the Lake of Hali, names that Chambers borrowed from the writings of Ambrose Bierce.
Lovecraft was a fan of the book and included references to the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign in his short story "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930).
August Derleth later expanded on this connection in his own stories, rendering Hastur as an evil deity related to Cthulhu and the King In Yellow as one of his incarnations.
The book showed signs of great age—its pages were made of palm leaves and its binding was of an ancient, now-extinct cycadean wood.
Harold Hadley Copeland, a leading authority on the Scripture, produced a translation of the book, published in 1907 by Miskatonic University Press.
The book has been translated in English by Professors Theodore Hayward Gates and Pascal Chevillion in 1714 and describes the Great Old One Kassogtha, sister and incestuous bride of Cthulhu.
[14] Rumor has it that Mythos Scholar, Antonius Quine, once published a corrected edition of the Revelations of Gla'aki bound in a single volume.
The Tarsioid Psalms are a collection of writings ascribed to the early Cenozoic Era, which some fans attribute to a fictional primate-folk of Paleocene/Eocene North America.
The tablets themselves are described as 12 engraved pieces of black jade inscribed by the fictional author Zanthu, a wizard and high priest of Ythogtha.
The tablets reveal a partial history of Mu, describing Zanthu's struggle against the rising cult of Ghatanothoa and his own religion's lamented decline.
Upon witnessing three black, beaked, slimy heads, "vaster than any mountain", rising from a gorge, he flees in terror when he realizes that they are merely the god's fingertips.
The character Harold Hadley Copeland published a brochure entitled The Zanthu Tablets: A Conjectural Translation in 1916 of the lore timeline.
In 1913 of the lore timeline, guided by the Ponape Script, the character Copeland led an expedition into Indochina to locate the plateau of Tsang and to find the tomb of Zanthu.
The main literary purpose of books in the Mythos is to explain how characters within the tales come by occult or esoteric knowledge that is unknown to the general populace.
However, in some cases the works themselves serve as important plot devices or simply opportunities for members of the Lovecraft Circle to pay homage to one another and other sources.
