The Doom of Yakthoob

"The Doom of Yakthoob" is a short story by Lin Carter that first appeared in the Summer 1971 issue of The Arkham Collector. It is the first of a series of short fiction pieces Carter offered as autobiographical sketches by Abdul Alhazred from the Necronomicon.
The story concerns Alhazred's education, in which he "learned the summoning-up of Evil Things." It introduced Yakthoob, the "notorious Saracen wizard" who served as Alhazred's mentor, as well as "the languid and dissolute Ibn Ghazoul," Alhazred's fellow student and closest friend. The plot explains how Yakthoob met a gruesome end due to Ibn Ghazoul's selfish indulgence of vices.
Carter describes Alhazred's initiation into esoteric knowledge as taking place in Egypt: He "conversed with ghouls in the rock tombs of Neb and even partook of the unnamed Feasts of Nitocris in loathsome crypts beneath the Great Pyramid," descended the Secret Stairs to the "black catacombs below the crumbling ruins of elder and ghoulhaunted Memphis," and performed "Blasphemous Rites" In the "noxious caverns of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown Valley of Hadoth by the Nile."
==Publication History==
After its initial appearance in The Arkham Collector (including the hardbound omnibus The Arkham Collector: Volume I), "The Doom of Yakthoob" was reprinted in the Yuletide 1985 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu (#36), and again in the Candlemas 1990 issue (#70). It was included in the Cthulhu Mythos anthologies The New Lovecraft Circle (Fedogan & Bremer, 1996) and The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab (Chaosium, 1996).
Category:Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Lin Carter works