#necroscope

The World of Necroscope (1995) is one of many licensed properties picked up by West End for the MasterBook game (the big get was Indiana Jones, but I don’t own a copy of that). I dunno if I would call Necroscope a big get, but it isn’t a small one — the whole series is like 17 books long and the run has at least one best-seller.

I don’t think I would call Lumley a good writer, but based on Burrowers Beneath, he is an enthusiastic one. Excitable, perhaps. To wit: the Necroscope series tells of the war between psychics (primarily Harry Keogh, the titular necroscope, who can politely chat with the dead) and vampires (parasitic leeches from another planet, grown from fungal spores). In the mix is E-Branch, the secret psychic/supernaturalism bureau of the UK government, perhaps some Russian scientists and a sentient time travel device? I’m not sure. I do know that after five books, Harry brings about the nuking of Vampire World and his consciousness is sent out and attaches to other people (to fuel the next 12 novels) while his own vampire fungus-infected corpse is sent back through time…to infect the first vampire? I would have thrown that novel across the room, I think.

Necroscope #4 (1993)

Pet Sematary (Stephen King) "The premise of this book is that there is a place out in the woods that if you bury a dead animal, it will come back to life - but it comes back Wrong. And if you were to do it to a person, something else would come back, in their body, in their place; something eldritch and evil. I'm sure someone else has already done a better submission of it with a more fleshed out synopsis but I actually want to nominate it because of this thing Stephen King does where he makes your blood run cold by dropping, in the middle of a completely innocent paragraph, "And now Gage, who had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously." It's chilling and inevitable and you don't have any way to stop it.

This book deals with death in a lot of ways, some of them positive and healthy but most of them /definitively not/. It's very Leitner because of how it makes you think about death conceptually from a lot of different angles, but in the end appreciate its finality. Because the alternative is worse."

Necroscope (Brian Lumley) "DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES…

Except to Harry Keogh, Necroscope. And what they tell him is horrifying.

In the Balkan mountains of Rumania, a terrible evil is growing. Long buried in hallowed ground, bound by earth and silver, the master vampire schemes and plots. Trapped in unlife, neither dead nor living, Thibor Ferenczy hungers for freedom and revenge.

The vampire's human tool is Boris Dragosani, part of a super-secret Soviet spy agency. Dragosani is an avid pupil, eager to plumb the depthless evil of the vampire's mind. Ferenczy teaches Dragosani the awful skills of the necromancer, gives him the ability to rip secrets from the mind and bodies of the dead.

Dragosani works not for Ferenczy's freedom but world domination. He will rule the world with knowledge taken from the dead.

His only opponent: Harry Koegh, champion of the dead and the living.

To protect Harry, the dead will do anything--even rise from their graves!"

Main character power is communicating with the dead very End-coded