The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

 

I read this in a coffeeshop today. It's four short stories ("The Repairer of Reputations" might border on novella) and they're all really good. The influence on Lovecraft is glaringly obvious. There are other stories in Chambers' original collection, this just printed the four that all directly connect to the (fictional) play, "The King In Yellow." Pretty amazing stuff, given it was written around the turn of the 20th century--the prose still holds, though the imagined then-future looks distinctly strange. There are some unsurprising echoes in here of The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I get the sense Chambers and Wilde were writing about or responding to the same or similar artistic movements (I'd have to check how contemporaneous they were). Very interesting stuff, another demonstration that the past was a very weird place.