English, by Montgomery Crompton. 1810. Duodecimo. White leather over wood cover. Handwritten, roughly 160 pages. Title is a poorly rendered frontispiece of faux-Egyptian styling. Written in sloppy and erratic brown and, sometimes fading, black ink. Amateurishly bound, and the spine is separating in places. You are aware that the book is bound in human skin. The pages have a slight but unmistakable sense of being oily, but leave no physical residue when handled.
Research
Initial Reading
This work purports to be the diary (though it functions more as an autobiography) of Montgomery Crompton, a British soldier and artist. Its first few pages recount his life as a member of the landed gentry in Northern England up until the point he is dispatched in 1801 to Egypt under General Sir Ralph Abercrombie.
Seriously wounded in battle, he recovered after several weeks of a high fever and a series of what he claims were occult visions. Remaining in Egypt to recuperate, he was inducted into a secretive cult. Claiming to have survived from ancient times, the cult worshiped a mythical figure known as the “Black Pharaoh”, a forgotten ruler of ancient Egypt said to have possessed magical, possibly divine, powers.
As a cult member, Crompton witnessed and participated in acts of torture, murder, and rape, as well as weird magical ceremonies all in praise of this Black Pharaoh (sometimes called “Nivrin Ka”).
In 1805 he returned to Great Britain where, settling near Liverpool, he and a group of other British converts attempted to replicate the cult and its depraved rites before being thwarted by unnamed, but mockingly condemned, local authorities.
Crompton apparently composed this work whilst incarcerated in an asylum. Even from a quick skim, it is obvious that the author was a murderously sadistic lunatic prone to megalomaniacal delusions, foremost of which is that he would achieve god-hood through his occult practices.
Masks of Nyarlathotep 