An artist turns to fiction
Robert William Chambers lived from 1865 to 1933. He trained as an artist, spending years in Paris before returning to America and working as an illustrator. His first novel, In the Quarter, drew on the world of artists abroad. The King in Yellow followed in 1895.
The Maker of Moons appeared the next year. These early books established the part of his reputation now most familiar to readers of weird fiction. They occupied a relatively small part of a long, commercially successful writing career that ranged through historical novels and romances. The breadth of that career also helps explain the changes of mood within his story collections.
A dangerous play glimpsed in fragments
The King in Yellow names both Chambers’s collection and the imagined play that disturbs characters in its opening four stories. Readers encounter the play through fragments and the effects it has on those who read it. In The Repairer of Reputations, a confident narrator describes a future America while giving the reader reasons to question his understanding. Later pieces in the collection move towards other kinds of tale. The Maker of Moons offers another set of encounters with the extraordinary. Lumitheca holds that collection in a 1902 Putnam printing.
