Book cover for Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign by John Langan and Lisa Morton

Under Twin Suns

Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign

2021 Released
338 Pages
5-7 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Hippocampus PressISBN 9781614983316

In this anthology of weird fiction, twenty-two authors share their harrowing visions of worlds shaped by the Yellow Sign, in stories and poems inspired by Robert W. Chambers's foundational works of weird horror. From the personal to the historic, from the macabre to the fantastic, the stories and poems gathered here illuminate new, unexpected realities shaped by the King in Yellow, under the sway of the Yellow Sign, or in the grip of madnesses inspired by their power.


Authors included: Marc Abbott - Linda D. Addison - Meghan Arcuri - Greg Chapman - JG Faherty - Trevor Firetog - Patrick Freivald - Carol Gyzander - Todd Keisling - John Langan - Curtis Lawson - Adrian Ludens - Lisa Morton - Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. - Sarah Read - Kathleen Scheiner - Ann K. Schwader - Darrell Schweitzer - J. Daniel Stone - Steven Van Patten - Tim Waggoner - Kaaron Warren


Robert W. Chambers's classic work of weird fiction, The King in Yellow (1895), contained two stories that have exercised wide influence in the genre. "The Repairer of Reputations" introduced the world to The King in Yellow, a play in two acts, banned for its reputed power to drive mad anyone who reads its complete text. Another story, "The Yellow Sign," used the experiences of an artist and his model to elaborate on the mythos of the Yellow King, the Yellow Sign, and their danger to all who encounter them. In those tales Chambers crafted fascinating glimpses of a cosmos populated by conspiracies, government-sanctioned suicide chambers, haunted artists, premonitions of death, unreliable narrators-and dark, enigmatic occurrences tainted by the alien world of Carcosa, where the King rules in his tattered yellow mantle. In Carcosa, black stars rise and Cassilda and Camilla speak and sing. In Carcosa, eyes peer from within pallid masks to gaze across Lake Hali at the setting of twin suns.

John Langan

John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman and House of Windows, and two collections of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. With Paul Tremblay, he coedited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. He's one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which he served as a juror during its first three years. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine.

More by John Langan

Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, Bram Stoker Award(R)-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association's Readers' Advisory Guide to Horror as "consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening." She has published four novels, 200 short stories, and three books on the history of Halloween. Her latest releases include Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated The Art of the Zombie Movie; recent short stories appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2020, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and Classic Monsters Unleashed. Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.

More by Lisa Morton

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