Robert William Chambers (1865–1933) was one of America’s most popular authors of his time. An early interest in art was eventually turned into a writing career, and his first book, In the Quarter, was based on Chambers’s experiences in France as an art student. Its success was sufficient to encourage him to try a second book, The King in Yellow (1895), which turned out to be an instant success and set Chambers on a writing career which lasted forty years. The King in Yellow has been described as the most important work of American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. Certainly, it was one of the most successful books of the macabre to originate in America, and it is somewhat surprising that Chambers returned to the genre only occasionally thereafter.

For this volume, the first of a two-volume collection of supernatural tales by Robert W. Chambers from Ash-Tree Press, Hugh Lamb has selected the finest of the stories written in the period prior to 1900.