Joel Green's Blog, page 3

Book Review: Necronomicon Ex-Mortis – Abdul Alhazred.

 

I hated this book.

Not a great way to start a review, but I’m nothing if not honest. Alhazred’s seminal occult grimoire is an arduous schlep through a swamp of tedium and incomprehensible gibberish that left me cold.

My first hint of doubt came when I unwrapped the book and had my first good look at the cover. Talk about trying too hard – an apparently leather-bound volume with a comical monster face embossed on the front. The overall effect, obviously intended to be creepy, just comes off as amateurish and the disembodied whispering voices emanating from thin air reek of desperation.

[image error]I suppose I’m meant to be impressed.

Really – are these cheap, undignified gimmicks absolutely necessary?

The over-long and meandering narrative tells the story of Yog-Sothoth, the Old Ones and Cthulhu in such a wildly inconsistent and plot-hole ridden manner as to be barely coherent. Alhazred attempts to provoke a sense of sinister threat in sections were the genre seems almost to be horror, but these attempts fall flat, buried beneath the groan-inducing repetition of ominous phrases about gates and keys and foul winds and blah blah blah blah… Dark foreboding on its own without substantial pay-off just becomes eye-rollingly dull after a while, as it did for me, struggling valiantly to keep my attention focused on this mind-numbing tome.

I became increasingly convinced that it wasn’t worth the effort I took to learn the Old Arabic Necronomicon Ex-Mortis is written in.

The experience did not improve when Alhazred’s tone shifts into periods of dry recitation and obscure instructional writing that cannot even be called narrative prose. It was during these sections of the book that the really embarrassingly pathetic attempts to stand out were made. At one point, Alhazred instructs the reader to recite a passage out loud while ominously warning of the dark and evil consequences of doing so, making himself sound like a carnie operating a ghost train ride at the county fair. But, being a good sport, I played along.

[image error]Get a load of this gibberish.

So, some credit where it’s due: the mixed-media portion of the book is quite original and even mildly impressive. After the recitation, deceased animals digging their way out of my lawn and attempting to break into my home were a fairly unique gimmick for a book, not to mention the howling, wraithlike shadow-beings that began flitting about my sitting room. But what does it actually mean? Clever little quirks are all well and good, but their inclusion in a book can’t just be for novelty’s sake – they need to serve the plot. Here they do not, and so, impressive or not, I can’t give Necronomicon Ex-Mortis a higher rating based on these ‘supernatural’ displays.

Further to that, I would be remiss if I failed to point out Bugg-Shash la ytaq! shaftayh tamtasan ‘iinah la yaerif alhazimat lakunah yasqut dahiatah fi al’akhir ; ‘ayu , ela alrghm mn ‘anah yatabie dhlk aldahiat hataa almawt wama baedah litahqiq hadafihi. ma aldhy yastayqiz alsharu aldhy yjb ‘an yakun mytana , mkrwhana fi ‘asabie alrueb fi alras?

هذا ليس ميتًا والذي يمكن أن يكذب أبديًا ، ومع الدهور الغريب قد يموت الموت

…Now I’ve lost my train of thought. That’s how boring Necronomicon Ex-Mortis is. Even writing about it is causing me to go off wool-gathering. It’s even worse than that, though – I feel almost as if I’ve been infected by the book somehow. I feel it writhing inside me; in my nerves… in my mind. I attribute the greenish glow radiating from the veins in my arms to a physiological response to extreme boredom.

[image error]What evil wakes that should lie dead, Swathed in horror toe to head?

Alhazred’s book could be interpreted as some kind of attempted piss-take lampooning horror and the occult. Except that I don’t think it really is. The author seems to be completely serious and has devoted considerable effort to produce a result that sadly fails to hit the mark.

I give Necronomicon Ex-Mortis a score of one star out of five and will be donating it to goodwill at my earliest opportunity. Now I have to sign off because the tree on my front lawn has grown tentacles and is attempting to get at me through the bay window. Thanks a bunch, Mr. Alhazred!

★✰✰✰✰

Re: ‘Jumanji’ board game

To Whom It May Concern:

I recently had the extreme misfortune of purchasing your board game, ‘Jumanji’, in the hope that it would serve as an entertaining diversion with which to pass the time. As an avid consumer of tabletop games there is a certain level of functionality and enjoyment I have come to expect and, moreover, a degree of safety both physical and psychological that I feel it is reasonable to anticipate in such a product.

Your product has failed utterly to meet those expectations.

[image error]It looked fun to begin with…

I have no complaints about the quality of the set. Indeed, in terms of presentation, the ‘Jumanji’ board game seemed a step above the competitors, but then I began to play…

Did it amuse your creative team, I wonder, to inflict such horrors upon your unsuspecting customers? Did you think that it was perfectly acceptable to expose players, likely including young children, to mortal danger when all they’d wanted was an afternoon’s wholesome fun?

No sooner had I played a couple of moves and your twice-cursed game, employing a heretofore unexplained astrophysical phenomenon, opened some kind of Einstein-Rosen bridge. A so-called ‘wormhole’, which violently pulled me into an alternate universe and a jungle-choked world populated by savage beasts and psychotic killers.

[image error]Attempted murder by gun-toting lunatics is not an expected outcome of playing a board game.

Though shocking enough in its own right, I couldn’t help but wonder why you and your compatriots had seen fit, upon stumbling onto such a ground-breaking, game-changing (ha!) technology as artificial wormholes, to misuse the discovery so badly. This mechanism belongs in the hands of NASA, not crammed into a board game. What, I ask, was the thinking here?

Nevertheless, the true horrors were yet to come.

I will spare you the details of the subsequent thirty years of hell I experienced within the pocket-universe your damnable board game whisked me away to. I’m sure you are well aware of the giant, blood-sucking insects, the sabre-toothed predators and the man-eating plants your creative team gleefully inflicted upon me.

But there. I know you didn’t miss it – thirty years. By the time I was rescued from that nightmare I’d almost forgotten human language. The world had changed and I was peeved to discover that I had been presumed dead.

How does your company propose to compensate me for this suffering?

Oh, of course, after wholesale destruction and chaos involving an invasion by the denizens of that alternate universe that almost certainly resulted in deaths, the game had that final trick up its sleeve. I know you will claim that everything is perfectly fine because it’s all undone. Yes, thirty years of history. All the billions of lives lived in that time casually erased so that your silly little game can reset the board.

[image error]I suppose you think this makes everything alright?

And what about my mental anguish? Thirty years of torture still sit heavy in my mind. I am a broken man.

My opinion of your company and product line has been forever tarnished by this experience. I can only hope that the intention of this board game wasn’t to inflict traumatic stress on your presumably valued customers.

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss matters further and to learn of how you propose to make recompense for the pain and suffering I have endured as a result of this regrettable experience. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully,

J. Green.