Carcosa: The Complete Mythos Before Lovecraft: Annotated Edition (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798950343506)

Before Lovecraft, before True Detective, there was Carcosa.

In 1886 Ambrose Bierce wrote a short story about a man lost in a ruined country, trying to find his way back to a city called Carcosa. Five years later he gave a gentle god named Hastur to a shepherd. In 1895 Robert W. Chambers took both names, threw away everything they had meant, and built the most influential nightmare in American weird fiction.

Chambers' cursed play, his lost city, and his dread Yellow Sign went on to haunt H. P. Lovecraft, seed the Cthulhu Mythos, and shock a new generation through HBO's True Detective. But the names were never his. This edition prints all seven pieces of the Yellow Mythos in the order they were written, so the borrowing can be read as it actually happened.

This annotated edition includes:

Bierce's An Inhabitant of Carcosa (1886) and Haïta the Shepherd (1891)

All four Yellow Sign stories from Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895): The Repairer of Reputations, The Mask, In the Court of the Dragon, and The Yellow Sign

The Prophets' Paradise, the prose poems at the hinge of Chambers' book

An original introduction tracing the line from Bierce to Chambers to Lovecraft to the present day

A headnote before every piece

A Glossary of the Yellow Mythos, with every Bierce origin flagged and the later accretions kept separate

An appendix from Lovecraft's own Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), where he states the debt plainly

The scolloped tatters are waiting.