I really wanted to like this book. I always imagined what the actual Al-Azif would be like to a reader instead of always witnessing the after effects of someone who read the book. Some things however, are better left to the imagination because I don't know what the actual prose and poetry of The Necronomicon entail, but I know it is not this. The good - the short stories that begin the book are good; they are both horrific and hilarious in turn, and feature stories from Lovecraft contemporaries of Lovecraft to modern storytellers. The bad - almost everyting after the fiction. It all starts with Lin Carter's take on the Dee translation of The Necronomicon. It reads as a travelogue, and not being a huge fan of Carter's fiction, not a great one at that. Other retellings suffer the same problem as they serve more as retellings of Alhazred's journeys and adventures and less about the contents of The Necronomicon. This may be my bias coming in here because my imagining of the blasphemous tome is more in line as a summoning and spell book, which is probably more like a sourcebook for COC than actual fiction. Moreover, the stories about Abdul Alhazred are not bad, and some are good reads, but I think these stories would have been utilized better in a book of stories covering his life, not stuffed into this large tome about the Necronomicon. This collection ends with a commentary by Robert Price, and it discusses the Judeo-Christian history of the Necronomicon, or how the Necronomicon borrows from Judeo-Christian history. I have great respect for Robert Price, but this comes from the August Derleth idea of the Old Ones punished by the Elder Gods and their affiliation with elements, and it is just bad. Considering Lovecraft's disdain for Christianity this inclusion kind of surprises me, but maybe there isn't as much about The Necronomicon as I thought, or at least none publishable. Conclusion - there are some real gems in here, and I highly recommend the first half of this collection. However, once you get into the commentaries and "translations" of The Necronomicon," this book loses a lot of its magic. These are nonsensical and I don't see myself wanting to utilize any of these ideas in a COC campaign. It borrows heavily from Derleth's terrible ideas and not what I hoped this would be. Again, this may be a personal issue, but by the end of reading this, I really just wanted it to be done. Instead, I leave it to my imagination what the contents of the Al-Azif would be, and maybe that is what Lovecraft wanted us to do all along.