Master of modern occultism, Lon Milo DuQuette, (author of Enochian Vision Magick and The Magick of Aleister Crowley) introduces the newest Weiser Books Collection—The Magical Antiquarian Curiosity Shoppe. Culled from material long unavailable to the general public, DuQuette curates this essential new digital library with the eye of a scholar and the insight of an initiate. Robert W. Chamber's most hauntingly romantic tale from his collection of horror. From the intro: The most achingly beautiful and romantic of all the vignettes of The King in Yellow. Chambers exquisitely colors each scene, each action, each thought with the measured care of a master painter driven mad with ecstatic love. In this installment he makes no mention of the dreaded document, The King in Yellow, but he really doesn’t need to. By now the reader has been drawn into the unspoken nightmare of its spell – trapped like some helpless prehistoric beast sinking slowly to ia suffocating death in a tar-pit of elegantly phrased insanity. Will love prevail for our hero?
Author
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and writer. Chambers was first educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute,and then entered the Art Students' League at around the age of twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow student. Chambers studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and at Académie Julian, in Paris from 1886 to 1893, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. On his return to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue magazines. Then, for reasons unclear, he devoted his time to writing, producing his first novel, In the Quarter (written in 1887 in Munich). His most famous, and perhaps most meritorious, effort is The King in Yellow, a collection of weird short stories, connected by the theme of the fictitious drama The King in Yellow, which drives those who read it insane. Chambers returned to the weird genre in his later short story collections The Maker of Moons and The Tree of Heaven, but neither earned him such success as The King in Yellow. Chambers later turned to writing romantic fiction to earn a living. According to some estimates, Chambers was one of the most successful literary careers of his period, his later novels selling well and a handful achieving best-seller status. Many of his works were also serialized in magazines. After 1924 he devoted himself solely to writing historical fiction. Chambers for several years made Broadalbin his summer home. Some of his novels touch upon colonial life in Broadalbin and Johnstown. On July 12, 1898, he married Elsa Vaughn Moller (1882-1939). They had a son, Robert Edward Stuart Chambers (later calling himself Robert Husted Chambers) who also gained some fame as an author. Chambers died at his home in the village of Broadalbin, New York, on December 16th 1933.
