Now that you’ve read these two Bierce works, we are moving to the work that I feel is the most like Lovecraft’s Mythos. We will be reading Robert W. Chambers’ The Yellow Sign.
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-st...YellSign.shtml
It has many parallels to Lovecraft’s writings, both in terms of details and looking at the big picture. See if you can find them as you read it!
In my copy of The King in Yellow, this is a 19 page story.
Robert W Chambers was a very popular writer in his day. He published a ton of books that were on the level of a Danielle Steele or Robert Grisham. It wasn’t literature, and it didn’t stand the test of time. He turned to romantic fiction and was a best seller. However, what has stood out was a publication from 1895 called The King in Yellow. It was a group of stories built around a common theme. That publication was massively influential to the horror genre generically, and the Cthulhu mythos specifically.
The King in Yellow has been so influential, you can feel it in lots of places. There are references to it or things in it all over the place – video games, novels, short stories, movies, tv shows, and more. Chambers just brilliantly captures the imagination and some nasty scary things in this book.
Here’s what Lovecraft said of the man in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith:
Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans – equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them.
So, let’s read the story that, in my opinion, is the closest to reading like a Mythos story, and is one of my favorites of the Gen 0 stories. Ready?