Free Horror: The 100 Best Books by Kim Newman, Stephen Jones Page A

sequels, Ayesha and She and Allan , to meet her again. A horror story? Not really. Say rather, a romance in its truest sense -- a narrative which passes beyond the limits of ordinary life. Fantasy authors shouldn't have to work down among the dead men all the time. If She were written today it would probably emerge as a sado-sexual romp, with its heroine bedding half the Amahagger before lustfully scorching her reincarnated lover Leo to a crisp. It's a measure of Rider Haggard's skill that, without allowing Ayesha any intimacies beyond the endearments "thee" and "thou", he nevertheless conjures up the most vivid female character in supernatural fiction, creating an unattainable feminine ideal against which men dash themselves as moths against a flame. Unattainable. Isn't that the secret of fantasy's appeal? A longing for the infinite. And Haggard gives us the perfect image -- "as the fishes see the stars, but dimly". It was his friend Andrew Lang, the Scottish mythographer and poet, who provided the sonnet which might serve as an epitaph for both She and Haggard --
    ". . . Nay, not in Kor, but in whatever spot In town or field, or by the insatiate sea, Men brood o'er buried loves and unforgot, Or break themselves on some divine decree, Or would o'er leap the limits of their lot -- There, in the tombs and deathless, dwelleth SHE ."
    That's if immortals need epitaphs. -- TIM STOUT
    19: [1895] ROBERT W. CHAMBERS - The King in Yellow

    The King in Yellow collects two sets of linked stories. The second half of the book consists of a batch of sentimental novelettes with titles like "The Street of the Four Winds" and "The Street of the First Shell", dealing with the lives and loves of the Bohemian set in Paris. The first series, however, which comprises "The Repairer of Reputations", "The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon" and "The Yellow Sign", has as a continuing thread a play called The King in Yellow , which seems to call down a strange doom on anyone who reads it. The stories involve a fascist-run New York of 1925, prophetic dreams and a solution which will turn living flesh into marble. Several of the names -- Carcosa, the Lake of Hali, Hastur -- were later re-used by Lovecraft to add sinister hints of a continuity between his stories, which also have an evil book as one of their key elements; interestingly, Chambers took a few of these names from the works of his contemporary, Ambrose Bierce. A single tale, "The Demoiselle D'Ys", links the two halves of the collection: it is a romantic ghost story with a French setting. Besides influencing Lovecraft and -- through him -- the Weird Tales generation, Chambers' book was read by Raymond Chandler, who had Philip Marlowe solve a vaguely related case in his short story of the same title. Chambers wrote a handful of other horror stories, but spent the rest of his successful career producing slick society romances.
    ***
    Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow , a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby . The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is "The Yellow Sign", in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail. "Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I "it "im "e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted "is soft, mushy fist one of "is fingers come off in me "and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a