I’ve never spent more than 10 minutes looking at any of the numerous (fake!) Necronomicons. The whole Simon shtick strikes me as a very Seventies gag. But as Trisaneldritch pointed out earlier in the thread, Levenda’s 3 book meditation on American occultism - Sinister Forces - (while slightly obsessed by Manson et al) is a rather splendid and well researched synthesis of why the USA behaves and thinks the way it does today. Spoiler alert: the weird stuff starts long before the Puritans gets there and there are Nazis involved…
