myriad secret societies. He is mainly remembered as the author of the Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults or The Black Book), which was published shortly before his death. Six months after his return from an expedition to Mongolia, he was found dead in a locked and bolted chamber with taloned finger marks on his throat. Robert M. Price compares the death of Von Junzt to the demise of Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon: "[In] Lovecraft's tongue-in-cheek 'History of the Necronomicon'...he recounts the doom of Abdul Alhazred. 'He is said by Ebn Khallikan ... to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses.' ...And 'what of the monstrous hand that strangled out his life?' In both cases, the coroner reports the cause of death as a phantom monster suspiciously like the one that rent Lovecraft himself limb-from-limb in Robert Bloch's 'The Shambler From The Stars'." At the time of his death, von Junzt was working on a second book, the contents of which are unknown since it was burnt to ashes by his friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau. Having read the book before destroying it, Ladeau afterwards slit his own throat with a razor. Von Junzt was one of the few people to have read the Greek version of the Necronomicon. Narrator Almost nothing is known about the story's anonymous narrator. He is very learned, with extensive knowledge of history and anthropology, and has read much on the subject of ancient religion, including obscure or bizarre authors like von Junzt. His tastes in poetry go to the obscure and weird too, such as Geoffrey. Reception S. T. Joshi has called the story Howard's only "explicit Cthulhu Mythos story". He goes on to say that the toad-like monster in the story is likely Tsathoggua, the toad god created by Clark Ashton Smith. He cites as evidence the fact that Howard had already referenced Tsathoggua in an earlier tale, "The Children Of The Night". Robert Weinberg and E. P. Berglund, in their 1973 book The Reader's Guide To The Cthulhu Mythos, stated that "The Black Stone" was "the best Mythos story not written by Lovecraft himself." References Sources External links Full text at Australian Project Gutenberg 1931 short stories Cthulhu Mythos short stories Fantasy short stories Pulp stories Short stories by Robert E. Howard Works originally published in Weird Tales