For the first time in one volume, the best stories of one of America's most popular classic authors of the supernatural.

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.

For the first time in a single volume, Hugh Lamb has selected the best of the author's supernatural tales, together with an introduction which provides further information about the author who was, in his heyday, called 'the most popular writer in America'.

Robert William Chambers was an American artist and writer who was born May 26, 1865, and died December 16, 1933. He is best known for his 1895 collection of short stories called The King in Yellow. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Chambers was the son of William P. Chambers (1827-1911), a business and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton. When his mom was twelve, William P. was an intern with her famous business lawyer father, Joseph Boughton. This is how his parents met. In the end, they joined forces to start the law firm of Chambers and Boughton. It did well even after Joseph's death in 1861. The great-grandfather of Robert Chambers was a sailor in the British Royal Navy named William Chambers. He married Amelia Saunders (1765-1822), who was the great-granddaughter of Tobias Saunders of Westerly, Rhode Island. First, they moved from Westerly to Greenfield, Massachusetts. Then they moved to Galway, New York, where they had their son, also named William Chambers (1798-1874). The second William finished from Union College when he was 18. He then went to a college in Boston to study medicine. While he was still in school, he married Eliza P. Allen (1793-1880), who was a direct daughter of Roger Williams, who founded Providence, Rhode Island. They were some of the first people to live in Broadalbin, New York. Walt Boughton Chambers was his brother and a builder.