The Three Impostors

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

Two friends canoeing down the Danube camp on an island of willows where the border with another world wears thin. Lovecraft called it the finest weird story ever written.

Algernon Blackwood