Born and bred in Brooklyn, USA, artist and author Robert W. Chambers left a legacy of horror lauded by Lovecraft (although with some reservations) and other lovers of supernatural fiction. Me? I read and kinda liked okay "The Repairer of Reputations" a gajillion years ago, in Hartwell's The Dark Descent (1987), and now a copy of the 1982 Ace paperback (boring cover at bottom) of his major work, The King in Yellow (1895), sits unread upon my shelf. That's cool at least.
Mr. Chambers, how do?
You really need to read "The Yellow Sign", dude. It's...something else.
ReplyDeleteI first heard of "King in Yellow" in the BÖC song "E.T.I. (Extraterrestrial Intelligence)."
ReplyDeletedo you understand something in The repairer of reputations?
ReplyDeleteI read the King in Yellow on Project Gutenberg a few years ago, but retained little of it (although I liked his bizarre ideas and ornate style)... That's a pretty good argument for reading real books (as opposed to electronic ones) such as the ones with the great covers you have here.
ReplyDeleteMost of "The King in Yellow" consists of non-genre romance stories which were sappy when Chambers wrote them in 1895 and are totally unreadable today. But the collection starts with "The Repairer of Reputations," a story so surreal it suggests that LSD must have been invented in the 1890s, and ends with "The Yellow Sign," a real horror classic.
ReplyDeleteChembers also wrote a batch of other books, mostly garbage, but if you can track down a story called "The Maker of Moons," you will find further evidence for my LSD hypothesis.