Customer Reviews

The Yellow Sign and Other Stories

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The first half of the book (The Yellow Sign sub-book) was fantastic. It was imaginative and scary. My favorite story was THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
After The Yellow Sign, though. The book gets more and more tedious. Not to say that all the stories are bad, but some are, and most are very hard to read- and it's a big book.
So, I recommend this to any Cthulhu Mythos fan as a literary "source" for Lovecraft and great info on The King in Yellow (which may have inspired the idea for The Necronomicon).

I eagerly bought this book based on the King in Yellow tales by Chambers I had read years before. Yipes! Chambers wrote a ton of really dreadful stuff--silly, immature nonsense. Despite editor Joshi's disclaimers in the introduction that Chambers wasted a lot of his talent pandering to popularity, I don't think his comments adequately criticized the awfulness of much of this massive volume. Chambers undoubtedly could create real chills, but how the author of the King in Yellow short stories could descend into such pap is beyond me--what a disappointment and what a bore. Unless one is a total fanatic and has to have everything Chambers wrote that has a "fantastic" element, save your money and buy a small volume about the Yellow King. The only thing "fantastic" about most of these stories is how fantastically dreadful they are.

From the genius of 'The Repairer of Reputations', thescientific adventures of 'Into the Unknown' and the Holmseque 'TheFinder of Lost Persons', Robert Chambers shows why he was one of thepre-eminent mystery/horror writers of his era. Ghosts, mysteries,potty professors, it's all here. It's hard to believe such good stuffwas being written over a century ago...

Yellow Sign And Other Stories is a recommended pick for fans of Lovecraft, providing a collection of weird tales in the Lovecraft tradition of subtle horror and lurking underlying monsters. At the heart of it all is a 'Yellow Sign' and a horrible book which brings terror to those who dare to open it and mysterious beings who support an ancient horror. The stories are linked in tone but stand alone as excellent tales.

Editor S.T. Joshi warns all the readers that Chambers can reach sometimes the nadir of literature and that he tried to not include the worst thing in this collection.
Nevertheless the disappointment is high as soon as you end the book and realize that only the first 88 pages are worth reading (that is the King in Yellow)on a total of 643.
In the remaining 555 pages ideas are scarce, character are monodimensional and there's a disturbing sense of racism.
I'll advise Cthulhu and Weird tales fan to get a book with only the Repairman of Reputation (which is indeed a marvelous story) unless they are truly collectors.

The subtitle of this book, "The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W. Chambers," is highly misleading. The only complete works in this volume are "In Search of the Unknown" and "Police!!!" The rest of the text contains simply excerpts from five other books by Chambers. If you are looking for all of Chambers's writings, not just some representative pieces, you will need to look elsewhere. Amazon sells a 4-volume set, "The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Robert W. Chambers," which contains about 2,000 pages and is certainly far more complete than this collection of fragments.

very inventive. very original. and ha sure knows how to keep the reader from knowing what's going on. but he is too anarchicc in style, suddenly taking a long path AWAY from the horror. for example, he suddenly creates a love story in the middle of building a horror story with great promise. he can make a story become an unclear blur. he doesn't obey any rules, and it does not suit the stories.