The Cthulhu Mythos: Based Upon True Stories!

[LadyTevar]

A psi shock I hate that

Psi-shock.

Some religious nuts think that if they touch something evil, the evilness will make itself known. Burning, quasi-eletric shocks, 'Bad Feelings"... think of in LoTR, when Gandalf went to pick up The One Ring, or later when he replaced the cloth over Sauriman's Palantir.

It could be psycho-somatic. My belief that the book was evil added to the owner's belief = I thought it would hurt me, so it did.

Or it could be yet another of the weird quasi-ESP happenings that regualrly hit members of my family.

[Solauren]

Or it could have been stuff he was burning in his room and your skin reacting to it (not discounting psi stuff, just offering alternate possiblity)

Or

If the room was carpeted, it hide a metal wire grid and he was running a mild current through it to give that effect (I knew a guy that did that, until he spilled water in his room one day. Man that was funny to watch)

[Peregrin Toker]

Anyway, Tevar - the book owned by your friend is by no means the Necronomicon spoken of by Lovecraft... definately not if it's a paperback.

By the way ? there is no ?Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.? That hellish & forbidden volume is an imaginative conception of mine, which others of the W.T. group have also used as a background of allusion.

However, "Necronomicon" doesn't necessarily refer to the spellbook used as a plot device in Lovecraft's stories - it simply means "The Image Of The Law Of The Dead" in Greek.