The King in Yellow

A play in two acts circulates through Europe; those who finish reading it go mad. Chambers gathered his linked tales around that idea in 1895, invented the Yellow Sign, borrowed lost Carcosa from Ambrose Bierce, and then — having built the vocabulary that Lovecraft and half of modern horror would borrow — turned to writing romances for the rest of his life. The first four stories are why the book endures. Ninety-six plates, from Goya to Redon, chart the same haunted European imagination the play feeds on, with storms, duels and uneasy portraits crowding the page.