King in Yellow

In the autumn of 1998, I found myself walking the oak-lined streets of an old city, on a sultry subtropical night. I looked up through the narrow alley between the branches, and saw the rubicund light of Aldebaran gleaming at me. I was at a dead-end in my studies, and knew it, and had no better plans. At the moment the star's light fell on me, I felt a change; my frustration with my life slipped away, replaced by a bittersweet longing for another life I had known only in my dreams. It was soon after that I came into possession of a small press's library-bound edition of The King In Yellow. I had heard it mentioned, of course, in Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature", but in those days, the book was not widely reprinted, nor well-known outside of the small weird fiction community.

Oh, the poisonous beauty of it! The hints that lead you on to a precipice over the cloud-waves of Hali, and leave you there, unsatisfied and precarious!

I'll not spoil the experience for you, except to note that the Paris art student stories of the second half of the book, so often thought to be out of place in this collection, actually have subtle ties to the better-known horror stories.