Out of the Dark Volume One: Origins
Description
Published in 1998 by Ash-Tree Press.
Robert William Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895) has long been recognised as a landmark work in the field of the macabre, and has been described as the most important work of American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. Despite the book’s success, its author was to return only rarely to the genre during the remainder of a writing career which spanned four decades.
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 1920’s The Slayer of Souls, which features a monstrous conspiracy to take over the world: a conspiracy which can only be stopped by supernatural forces.
Contents
Introduction – Hugh Lamb
The Yellow Sign
A Pleasant Evening
Passeur
In the Court of the Dragon
The Maker of Moons
The Mask
The Demoiselle D’Ys
The Key to Grief
The Messenger
Trivia
This edition, and the later Out of the Dark Volume Two: Diversions, were combined into a single volume when HarperCollins republished the collection in 2018.
The cover art for In the Dark was done by Hugh Lamb’s son, Richard.