The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest is a Gothic novel written by Karl Friedrich Kahlert under the alias Lawrence Flammenberg and translated by Peter Teuthold that was first published in 1794. It is one of the seven 'horrid novels' lampooned by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. It was once thought not to exist except in the text of Northanger Abbey.Set in the Black Forest in Germany, 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 the dead. It has recently been republished in a modern edition by Valancourt Books which confirms the identity of the book's German author. Originally said to have been "Translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg by Peter Teuthold," a number of its readers, including scholarly readers, assumed this to be a way of adding to the authenticity of a Gothic text by claiming a German genealogy, a common British publishing practice in its day. However, this novel was originally written in German by Karl Friedrich Kahlert and then translated by Peter Teuthold.Teuthold's translated version of the novel differs from Kahlert's original German version substantially, most noticeably in the conscious addition of a plagiarized portion of the tale forming the robber Christian Wolf's confession from Friedrich Schiller's Der Verbrecher aus verlorner Ehre, written in 1786. Though very little is known about Teuthold, his translation, written unfaithfully to the original German text, reveals him to be "a conservative Englishman with anti-Jacobin sympathies who deliberately designed his translation to discredit German literature." Furthermore, the disorganization of the narrative (i.e., its confusing structure of frame narratives) was a result of Teuthold's poor management of his translation sources. "What might have been an anthology of separate legends and supernatural tales about the Black Forest was hastily amalgamated into a nearly incomprehensible Germanic Gothic meant to allure the [publishing company's] readers." One English contemporary review, published in 1794, comments on the poor quality of Teuthold's translation: "This work calls itself a translation from the German: out of respect to such of our countrymen as are authors, we heartily wish it may be a translation. We should be sorry to see an English original so full of absurdities."Contemporary English reviews of the novel mostly provide commentary on the superstitious beliefs (e.g., the existence of necromancy, curses, etc.) of the characters of the novel, which most reviewers generalize to the German people in their reviews: "In Germany, no doubt, such [superstitions] have made a wider impression and progress than in our country: since raising ghosts is an operation of frequent recurrence in The Necromancer." Another article says of the novel that "It exposes the arts which have been practiced in a particular part of Germany, for carrying on a series of nocturnal depredations in the neighbourhood, and infusing into the credulous multitude a firm belief in the existence of sorcery." Another review expounds on the usefulness of the book in disarming superstitious beliefs via entertainment: "To those who are fond of reading stories of ghosts, this book may be entertaining, and also instructive, as it may tend to [show] how easily superstition may be worked upon without any foundation in reality."In 1944, Michael Sadleir noted that "For magniloquent descriptions of 'horrid' episodes, for sheer stylistic fervour in the handling of the supernatural, the work can rank high among its contemporaries." In 1987, Frederick Frank wrote that the novel is a "splendid instance of the Schauerroman at a point of no rational return." Source: Wikipedia (en)