The Purple Cloud

Ten linked tales built around a forbidden play that drives its readers mad, with Carcosa, Hastur and the Yellow Sign. The first four stories shaped cosmic horror and later inspired Lovecraft and True Detective.

Robert W. Chambers

Bierce's collection of supernatural tales, including An Inhabitant of Carcosa, the story that first named the lost city later borrowed by Chambers and Lovecraft. Short, sharp and unsettling.

Ambrose Bierce

A surgeon opens a young woman's mind to the god behind the veil of reality, and the price is paid years later in London. The novella Lovecraft praised as one of the finest in weird fiction.

Arthur Machen

A girl's secret green book records her initiation into an ancient, hidden world of rituals and strange presences. Often named the greatest weird tale ever written, it is pure suggestion and slowly building dread.

Arthur Machen

A London mystery told through interlocking stories, among them The Novel of the Black Seal and The Novel of the White Powder. Machen's tales of survivals from a pre-human past directly influenced Lovecraft.

Arthur Machen