The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest is a Gothic novel by Ludwig Flammenberg (which is a pseudonym for Carl Friedrich Kahlert) first published in 1794. It is one of the seven 'horrid novels' lampooned by Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey", once thought not to exist except in the text of "Northanger Abbey". The novel consists of a series of lurid tales of hauntings, violence, killings and the supernatural featuring the adventures of Hermann and Helfried and the mysterious wizard Volkert the Necromancer, who has seemingly come back from
Northanger Abbey "The Monk". Isabella Thorpe gives Catherine a list of seven books that are commonly referred to as the "Northanger 'horrid' novels"; these works were later thought to be of Austen's own invention until the British writers Montague Summers and Michael Sadleir re-discovered in the 1920s that they actually did exist. The list is as follows: All seven of these were republished by the Folio Society in London in the 1960s, and since 2005 Valancourt Books has released new editions of the 'horrids', the seventh and final being released in 2015. The most significant allusion, however, is to Ann Radcliffe's "The