Mysteries of the Worm

In her review of Stephen King's latest novel, Revival (Scribner, 405 pp), Danielle Trussoni notes that the book "...is filled with cultural allusions both high and low ...particularly [to] Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm, which the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft used as the basis of his fictional grimoire Necronomicon.”

On first reading, I was excited to see that Trussoni does not characterize Mysteries of The Worm as fiction. Does she mean that Ludvig Prinn's diabolical book actually existed? Or is it merely the product of H.P. Lovecraft's fevered imagination? 

Neither, it seems. My research reveals a more tangled web. 

As we all know (or should know), Mysteries of the Worm  is one of the books of esoteric knowledge in the Lovecraft canon. I first encountered it in  his short story The Haunter of the Dark (1935), in which the daring Robert Blake enters the shunned church of the Starry Wisdom cult. There he discovers "a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes De Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprchlichen Kulten of von Junt and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis." The latter, translated from the Latin, supposedly means Mysteries of the Worm. 

Yet it seems horror writer Robert Bloch, and not Lovecraft himself, invented De Vermis Mysteriis. According to this Wikipedia article, the term first appeared in Bloch's short story The Shambler from the Stars (1935). From there it found its way into Lovecraft's work. The two writers knew each other, and some say that the name of the central character in The Haunter of the Dark, Robert Blake, is a veiled reference to the real-life Robert Bloch. Indeed, the Lovecraft story is dedicated to Robert Bloch. 

To complicate matters further, De Vermis Mysteriis, Mysteries of the Worm and several of the other esoteric books also appear in various Cthulhu mythos stories by other authors, some of whom wrote long after Lovecraft died. Bloch himself published a sequel to The Haunter of the Dark.  Titled The Shadow From The Steeple  and published in 1950, this final story in the diabolical Bloch/Lovecraft/Bloch trilogy further explores the horrors of the red-black crystal polyhedron discovered by Richard Blake (aka Robert Bloch). Bloch makes Lovecraft himself a character in the third tale. Confused yet? 

I can state with authority that Mysteries of the Worm was central to an early Stephen King short story, Jerusalem's Lot, published in the Night Shift collection (1978). This brings us full circle back to King's latest novel, which I plan to read at the first opportunity. 

To anyone who has made it this far through this lengthy post, I say this: of course I recognize that most normal persons do not require this much information regarding Mysteries of the Worm. But this is my blog, see? I can write about whatever I want, and waste my time any way I want, OK? I have satisfied myself that ol' Ludvig's Mysteries of the Worm is  just a fictional book. Trussoni's Revival review should have made this clear, so that nobody else would have to spend hours untangling this mystery.  

Links: 
Review by Danielle Trussoni -- New York Times, Nov. 21, 2014
Article: De Vermis Mysteriis  --  Wikipedia
Article: The Haunter of the Dark -- Wikipedia
Mysteries of the Worm by Robert Bloch -- Chaosium Inc,, paper, 272  pages, 1993. Contains  The Shambler from the Stars.