Robert M. Price compares the death of Von Junzt to the demise of Abdul Alhazred, author of the "Necronomicon": " Lovecraft's tongue-in-cheek 'History of the Necronomicon'...he recounts the doom of Abdul Alhazred. 'He is said by Ebn Khallikan ... to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses.' ...And 'what of the monstrous hand that strangled out his life?' In both cases, the coroner reports the cause of death as a phantom monster suspiciously like the one that rent Lovecraft himself limb-from-limb in Robert Bloch's 'The Shambler from the Stars'."