Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow (1895) has long been recognised as one of the landmark works in the field of the supernatural. Strangely, despite the book's success, its author was to return only rarely to the weird tale during the remainder of a writing career which spanned four decades and a wide variety of genres.

When Chambers did return to the supernatural, however, he displayed all the imagination and skill which distinguished The King in Yellow. He created the enigmatic and seemingly omniscient Westrel Keen, the 'Tracer of Lost Persons', and chronicled the strange adventures of an eminent naturalist who scours the earth for 'extinct' animals—and usually finds them. One of his greatest creations, perhaps, was the 1920 novel The Slayer of Souls, which features a monstrous conspiracy to take over the world: a conspiracy which can only be stopped by supernatural forces.

In this, the second volume of Robert W. Chambers's stories published by Ash-Tree Press, Hugh Lamb has selected the best of the author's weird fiction from the post-1900 period. There is an introduction by Lamb, which provides further information about the author who was, in his heyday, called 'The most popular writer in America'.