"The Alchemist's Notebook"

by Byron Craft
ByronCraft Books, 2013

The novel is told in three parts.

Janet is a young woman in Ipswich in the 1960's when she meets Faren Church, a young, free-living and ambitious drifter and photographer.  They set off on a cross-country adventure before settling in NYC.  Faren is drafted and sent to Vietnam.  While there, he has a strange experience involving a tribal shaman.

Faren returns from Vietnam a haunted man.  Unable to hold a job until, years later, he is offered a position as the head of a photographic department for a promotional firm called Emerson-Prynne.  In fact, this position involves nothing more than developing photographs, alone in a lab, for no apparent reason or purpose. His boss is a strange, "fishy" Innsmouth-type old man.

Faren receives word that a long-lost great uncle Heinrich Todesfall, a relative Faren never knew existed, has passed away, leaving his estate to Faren, including a large house in an isolated part of Germany's Black Forest.

Coincidentally, Emerson-Prynne has a new assignment for him - involving relocating to Germany, near the Black Forest, where he will head up a photographic project involving the placement of nuclear missile silos in the Black Forest region.  With some reservations, Faren accepts, on the grounds that the money will be enough that when the assignment ends in 12 months, he and Janet can return to the States with the resources to start his own studio.

This turns out to be not such a good deal.  The house is run-down and creepy.  A strange old man named Dr. Von Tassel appears from time to time.  He's less than friendly.  The people in the town shun the Churches.  When a local girl is found murdered, they seem to blame Janet.

Janet and Faren are plagued by nightmares.  And something seems to be haunting the house.  Red eyes are seen in shadows.  Strange prints are found.  There are odd bits of statuary and carvings in and around the house.

First Faren finds and reads a journal belonging to Uncle Heinrich.  He tries to hide it, but Janet too finds it and reads it.

It seems Heinrich grew up in the old house.  As a boy, he was taken by the Nazis and converted into a True Believer.  He rose in the Reich ranks and returned to the house commanding a squadron of men.  It became clear that the war was lost.  Many soldiers were killed, and ultimately buried, in the grounds around the old house.

After the war, Heinrich passed himself off as a professor and scientist.  But he became aware of the Cthulhu Mythos and saw in it a way to achieve the goals of the Third Reich.  He connected with the Esoteric Order of Dagon, traveled to Innsmouth (he found the Innsmouthers repulsive), and became the main man in entering Miskatonic U library and stealing their copy of The Necronomicon - killing Henry Armitage in the process.

Heinrich worked on rituals and scientific projects to unleash the Great Old Ones.  He discovered that a (the?) gate in was right there in the grounds of the old house.  He also discovered that a previously unknown Mythos'er, Yath-Notep, was imprisoned under the earth there, and that Yath-Notep was the being who could free the Great Old Ones.

Janet attempts to flee the Old House, but is attacked by zombies, risen bodies of the soldiers from the war.  Instead she holds up in the house and writes a detailed journal.

Meanwhile, Faren, having realized that the people he's working for are part of this vast occult conspiracy, rushes home to rescue her.  Von Tassel shows up, too, and reveals more of the story.  It seems that he is actually Milton Armitage, son, of Henry, who came there years ago to keep tabs on Heinrich.

Bad news - the stars are right and Yath-Notep is set to pop out this very night.  With help from Von Tassel, Faren is able to put a cork in the Great Old Ones and flees the old house with Janet, recording a journal of the whole experience and mailing it off to Miskatonic U and stealing a plane to go into hiding with his wife.

This particular piece has quite an origin. It began life as a screen treatment for the never-produced film "Cry of Cthulhu". I remember waiting for this one with great anticipation when it was previewed in "Starlog" in 1980. Craft explains in his introduction exactly how that project failed to launch.  It might have been a not-bad film. 

Now a novel, it's also not bad.  It's also not great.  There are some effectively scary moments in the early portions, but the dream sequences and the too-abrupt wrap-up undercut the spookiness of the first act.  There's some pretty profound lapses in logic ("the house is under attack by zombies - I know!  I'll sit here and write my life story in longhand!")  I still wouldn't have minded seeing the film.