Product Review

THE KING IN YELLOW and THE MYSTERY OF CHOICERobert W. Chambers was influenced by Ambrose Bierce and hailed by H. P. Lovecraft. He inspired such authors as Clark Ashton Smith, A. Merritt and Sax Rohmer. His works have been anthologized over the years in horror collections and his stories praised by such editors as Lin Carter, Hugh Lamb, Sam Moskowitz and Stephen Jones. Chambers didn’t write about vampires or haunted mansions. He was more directly inspired by the Decadents, and wrote about poisonings of the soul, taintings of the spirit, generating what Lovecraft referred to as “cosmic fear.”It all started with The King in Yellow, a collection of vaguely connected stories tied together by a forbidden book, the reading of which induces madness in its readers. Written in 1895 while the author was a young artist in Paris, these stories exude a Gothic sense, steeped in fetid darkness.The Mystery of Choice from 1897 collects further tales of mystery and unease, also loosely connected by its characters and mood. But unlike the foreboding gloom that pervades the stories of The King in Yellow, the supernatural tales in The Mystery of Choice are lighter in tone, set more in the outside world—the world of nature—and offer an interesting contrast to the earlier collection.We have removed the final three non-supernatural stories from the end of The King in Yellow, but offer The Mystery of Choice in its entirety. This volume forms part one of “The Complete Supernatural Fiction of Robert W. Chambers.”