The Three Impostors

Three conspirators tell stories to two idle young Londoners while they hunt for a fourth man, the young man with spectacles, and each story is a horror complete in itself - the novel of the black seal, the novel of the white powder. Machen built it as a set of boxes; the pieces inside are among the finest weird tales in English. Fifty-five plates by painters including Munch and Grimshaw carry the gaslit London and its uncanny doubles across the same years Machen's stories were written.