The King in Yellow

A play called The King in Yellow circulates in secret, and anyone who reads its second act is driven to madness or despair. Its fragments, about the lost city of Carcosa, the Yellow Sign and a pale king in tattered robes, haunt the first stories of this collection: a man convinced he is heir to an American empire, a sculptor who discovers a liquid that turns living things to marble, a church organist pursued by a terrible watchman.

Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933) had studied art in Paris, and the later stories in the book are romantic tales of artists' life there. He became a popular writer of romances, but this early collection of 1895 is the work that lasted: it influenced H. P. Lovecraft, as in The Call of Cthulhu, and modern horror writers and television.