Not a complete read through, but I'm not much for romance so I'm skipping the last two stories.

I enjoyed the other stories, but none of them seemed to have definitive ending.

Especially the war story.

I don't even know if everyone survived!

The supernatural stories were pleasantly creepy.

Okay, I have added all those books with Kindle editions to a separate wishlist, so I can track price drops (I love that feature!) and requested those that are not available. 

Horror expansion TBR:

Wishlist: amzn.com/w/VVF1YVWBKQ33

Booklikes challenge list: carla.booklikes.com/post/1064412/horror-tbr

Happy winter! Bring on the darker days, and scary novels to accompany them!

I have created a TBR list of horror. It's varied--classic and new, men and women, novels and short stories. The only common denominator is that I haven't read these particular works yet--and I ain't getting any younger, so it is time to begin, Gentle Reader.

Wanna play? http://booklikes.com/apps/reading-lists/267/horror-expansion

Nonexhaustive list of authors included:

Dan Simmons

Clive Barker

Joyce Carol Oates

Shirley Jackson

F. Paul Wilson

Richard Matheson

Harlan Ellison

Greg Chapman

Simon Clark

Bentley Little

Angela Carter

Chuck Palahniuk

Joe R. Lansdale

John Collier

Douglas Clegg

Ramsey Campbell

John Shirley

David V. Schow

Caitlin R. Kiernan

Poppy Z. Brite

Christa Faust

Graham Masterton

Robert W. Chambers

Elizabeth Massie

Kathe Koja

John Farris

Graham Joyce

Michael Slade

Fritz Leiber

Charles Beaumont

T. E. D. Klein

Peter Straub

Neil Gaiman

Gregor Xane

Jonathan Carroll

Steve Rasnic Tem

John Skipp

Francesca Lia Block

H. P. Lovecraft

Saki

Ronald W Chambers is something of an oddity in the annals of writerdom. He made a comfortable living writing popular romance - a kind of Nicholas Sparks of the 1910s and 20s - yet all of those books are now forgotten and he's now chiefly remembered for a single novel, one he wrote early on in his career, one which compared to his other work, counts as something of a failure.

The King in Yellow,a collection of short stories, owes at least part of its enduring fame to the fact that Lovecraft was a huge fan and cited Chambers as an inspiration for his own work. What Lovecraft especially liked about the collection, was the way Chambers connected his stories with the invention of an evil text - a play called 'The King in Yellow' - a work of such profound corruption that all those who read it go insane. This is a device that Lovecraft liked so much that he pinched it - creating his own nefarious text, The Necronomicon - a book containing the secrets which allow you to summon the Old Ones (an action which never ends well for the summoner you won't be surprised to hear).

Naturally, Chambers never reveals more than a few select quotes from this infamous work and actually only a one of the stories in the collection use it as a central device, but The King in Yellow is worth reading for that single story alone. I won't name it, because 1) that would be cheating and 2) I liked many of the others too. Chambers' writing is elegant and witty and even when he's being twisted, he does so with charming, old fashioned flair. 

In that respect, Chambers is more like Poe than Lovecraft, a writer he's also often bracketed with or Ambrose Bierce. If you like the idea that kind of post-Victorian creepiness, this is definitely something for you.

The King in Yellow is a collection of short (mostly) horror stories by Robert W. Chambers, published in 1895. I took up the book because I'm such a Lovecraft fan, and it was cited by the master of cosmic horror himself as one of his inspirations.

The book was... terrifying. I find my every waking hour now spent brooding over it's words, it's insidious message seeping into my thoughts, undoubtedly leaving a bitter taint on any joy I might have ever felt for the rest of my days.

Except, that's not exactly how I felt upon finishing the collection. That's how it would have been if halfway through, the stories hadn't stopped being horror, and started being, well, tales of romantic Americans living in Paris.

What can I say? The first half of the book seemed to be building a terrifying shared narrative across the stories in which a playwright has written a terrible script that wracks the minds of men, turning them insane with it's terrible truths. The various characters across the stories are irrevocably changed after reading the King in Yellow, and events all seem to be connected to the mysterious threat of the King in Yellow and the Pallid Mask.

However, just as I was expecting these threads to come together, the stories just kind of... stopped being about the King in Yellow. I found myself reading each story following "The Prophets Paradise" and at first wondering where the theme had gone, then wondering why I was reading what I was, and eventually just being outright bored.

The stories that follow the horror section aren't terrible... they have value and stand alone well. In particular the battle imagery in "The Street of the First Shell" is beautifully and hauntingly described. They just don't seem analogous with the rest of the collection, almost like they'd just been added in to pad out the page count.

However, the first half of this book is still a fantastic read that any horror fan would enjoy; just don't be upset when the book fizzles out towards the end.