Necronomicon
How Lovecraft conceived the name Necronomicon is not clear—Lovecraft said that the title came to him in a dream. Although some have suggested that Lovecraft was influenced primarily by Robert W. Chambers ' collection of short stories The King in Yellow , which centers on a mysterious and disturbing play in book form, Lovecraft is not believed to have read that work until 1927. Donald R. Burleson has argued that the idea for the book was derived from Nathaniel Hawthorne , though Lovecraft himself noted that "mouldy hidden manuscripts" were one of the stock features of Gothic literature . Lovecraft wrote that the title, as translated from the Greek language , meant "an image of the law of the dead", compounded respectively from νεκρός nekros "dead", νόμος nomos "law", and εἰκών eikon "image". Robert M. Price notes that the title has been variously translated by others as "Book of the names of the dead", &