Brian Lumley’s Necroscope Series

During a brief discussion I mentioned having read Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series and how much I enjoyed it, a friend said they would look into the author. I started thinking about the books and how young I was when I read them and wondered how I’d feel about them now, and before long I located the first novel and started reading it again.

It’s good. It’s good in a way that childhood me probably didn’t understand. But there are some coincidences that are somewhat tropey and it absolutely makes sense that I would have enjoyed how things unfolded.

Massive spoilers ahead.

The first book is titled Necroscope, and it begins by retelling parts of what has happened from the vantage point of several characters. The main character is named Harry and from the perspective where his story begins, he’s a child. And he talks to dead people. And eventually he will use the knowledge he gains from those dead people to command some powerful maths to open literal doorways to literal new worlds all while he’s busy fighting vampires. Of course I’d enjoy a story like that, it’s a metaphorical recipe for a good life and it’s told brilliantly with an exciting plot.

I forgot that this book was where I learned about (and how to solve) magic squares. And how to derive a formula to compute the sum of all the numbers between 0 and some arbitrary value inclusively. And to think rather practically about formula and the relationship of numbers to each other in those formula. And it may have been where I first learned what a Möbius strip is. I think I was in fifth grade when I read it the first time.

One thing fifth-grader me didn’t get from the story was how easy it was to feel compassion for the main villain. The path he was on set him up well for the terrible deeds he would perpetrate, but fifth-grader me just wrote him off as a bad guy. Fifth-grader me probably also didn’t appreciate the thoroughness of the author in establishing the characters and establishing believably realistic backgrounds and behaviors.

Anyway, every time I found yet another thing I had forgotten, it made me chuckle. I’m probably going to reread the rest of the series, but I finished the first one a little too quickly and I think I may have neglected other things I should be focusing on. So after a bit of a break I’ll dig into the next one.

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created: 2025-04-28

(re)generated: 2025-11-27