De Vermis Mysteriis - H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft, who enjoyed sprinkling references to his friends' fictional creations in his own Cthulhu Mythos efforts, repeatedly mentioned De Vermis Mysteriis in his stories. It appears in "The Haunter of the Dark" (written as a sequel to Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars") as a "hellish" book found with other forbidden texts in the Starry Wisdom Church in Providence, Rhode Island. In "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", ghostwritten by Lovecraft for William Lumley, it is likewise part of an occult library in the van der Heyl house in Attica, New York. And in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time", the possessed protagonist Wingate Peaslee reads (and makes marginal notes in) a copy of the book possessed by the Miskatonic University library.

In a 1936 letter to fellow Mythos writer Henry Kuttner, Lovecraft mentioned De Vermis Mysteriis as one of the books that "repeat the most hellish secrets learnt by early man".