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The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories written by Robert W. Chambers and published in 1895. The stories could be categorized as early horror fiction or Victorian Gothic fiction, but the work also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, science fiction and romance. The first four stories in the collection involve an imaginary two-act play of the same title. The first four stories are loosely connected by three main devices: A play in book form entitled The King in Yellow A mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity known as The King in Yellow An eerie symbol called The Yellow Sign These stories are macabre in tone, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents. The first story “The Repairer of Reputations”, is set in an imagined future 1920s America. The other stories in the book do not follow the macabre theme of the first four, and most are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers’ later work. Some are linked to the preceding stories by their Parisien setting and artistic protagonists. List of stories The stories present in the book are: The Repairer of Reputations The Mask In the Court of the Dragon The Yellow Sign The Demoiselle d’Ys The Prophets’ Paradise The Street of the Four Winds The Street of the First Shell The Street of Our Lady of the Fields Rue Barrée

The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories written by Robert W. Chambers and published in 1895. The stories could be categorized as early horror fiction or Victorian Gothic fiction, but the work also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, science fiction and romance. The first four stories in the collection involve an imaginary two-act play of the same title.

The first four stories are loosely connected by three main devices:

  • A play in book form entitled The King in Yellow
  • A mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity known as The King in Yellow
  • An eerie symbol called The Yellow Sign

These stories are macabre in tone, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents. The first story “The Repairer of Reputations”, is set in an imagined future 1920s America.

The other stories in the book do not follow the macabre theme of the first four, and most are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers’ later work. Some are linked to the preceding stories by their Parisien setting and artistic protagonists.

List of stories

The stories present in the book are:

  • The Repairer of Reputations
  • The Mask
  • In the Court of the Dragon
  • The Yellow Sign
  • The Demoiselle d’Ys
  • The Prophets’ Paradise
  • The Street of the Four Winds
  • The Street of the First Shell
  • The Street of Our Lady of the Fields
  • Rue Barrée
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984) is a picture book by the American author Chris Van Allsburg consisting of a series of unrelated, highly detailed images in the author’s distinctive style. Each image is accompanied by a title and a single line of text, which compels readers to create their own stories. A fictional editor’s note tells of an encounter with an author and illustrator named Harris Burdick, who provided the images and captions as samples, each from a different picture book he had written. He left with a promise to deliver the complete manuscripts if the editor chose to buy the books. Burdick was never seen again, and the samples are all that remain of his supposed books. Readers are challenged to imagine their own stories based on the images in the book.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984) is a picture book by the American author Chris Van Allsburg consisting of a series of unrelated, highly detailed images in the author’s distinctive style. Each image is accompanied by a title and a single line of text, which compels readers to create their own stories.

A fictional editor’s note tells of an encounter with an author and illustrator named Harris Burdick, who provided the images and captions as samples, each from a different picture book he had written. He left with a promise to deliver the complete manuscripts if the editor chose to buy the books. Burdick was never seen again, and the samples are all that remain of his supposed books. Readers are challenged to imagine their own stories based on the images in the book.

Dhalgren is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. The story begins with a cryptic passage: to wound the autumnal city.So howled out for the world to give him a name.The in-dark answered with wind. What follows is an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by some unknown catastrophe. William Gibson has referred to Dhalgren as “A riddle that was never meant to be solved.” An event horizon, enveloping Bellona, prevents all radio and television signals, even phone messages, from entering or leaving the city. A rift may have been created in space-time. One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the darkness. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times the size it ordinarily appears rises to terrify the populace, then sets—and the same featureless cloud cover returns, with no hint that it was ever otherwise. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other. It is their reactions to (and dealings with) the strange happenings and isolation in the city that are the focus of the novel, rather than the happenings themselves. The novel’s protagonist is a drifter who suffers from partial amnesia: he can remember neither his own name nor the names of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot. (Characters in two other Delany novels and one short story dress the same way: Mouse in Nova [1968], Hogg in Hogg [1995], and Roger in “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ Move on a Rigorous Line” [1967]). Possibly he is intermittently schizophrenic. Not only does the novel end in schizoid babble (which recurs at various points in the text), but the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of the “changes in reality” sometimes differs from that of the other characters. Also he suffers from other significant memory loss in the course of the story. As well, he is dysmetric, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city.

Dhalgren is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. The story begins with a cryptic passage:

to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

What follows is an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by some unknown catastrophe. William Gibson has referred to Dhalgren as “A riddle that was never meant to be solved.”

An event horizon, enveloping Bellona, prevents all radio and television signals, even phone messages, from entering or leaving the city. A rift may have been created in space-time. One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the darkness. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times the size it ordinarily appears rises to terrify the populace, then sets—and the same featureless cloud cover returns, with no hint that it was ever otherwise. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other. It is their reactions to (and dealings with) the strange happenings and isolation in the city that are the focus of the novel, rather than the happenings themselves.

The novel’s protagonist is a drifter who suffers from partial amnesia: he can remember neither his own name nor the names of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot. (Characters in two other Delany novels and one short story dress the same way: Mouse in Nova [1968], Hogg in Hogg [1995], and Roger in “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ Move on a Rigorous Line” [1967]). Possibly he is intermittently schizophrenic. Not only does the novel end in schizoid babble (which recurs at various points in the text), but the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of the “changes in reality” sometimes differs from that of the other characters. Also he suffers from other significant memory loss in the course of the story. As well, he is dysmetric, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city.

The Night Land is a classic horror novel by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. As a work of fantasy it belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre. Hodgson also published a much shorter version of the novel, entitled The Dream of X. The importance of The Night Land was recognized by its later revival in paperback by Ballantine Books, which republished the work in two parts as the forty-ninth and fiftieth volumes of its celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in July, 1972. H. P. Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” describes the novel as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written”. Clark Ashton Smith wrote of it that “In all literature, there are few works so sheerly remarkable, so purely creative, as The Night Land. Whatever faults this book may possess, however inordinate its length may seem, it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story; and it is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much of actual prophecy may have been mingled with the poesy.” When the book was written, the nature of the energy source that powers stars was not known: Lord Kelvin had published calculations based on the hypothesis that the energy came from the gravitational collapse of the gas cloud that had formed the sun, and found that this mechanism gave the Sun a lifetime of only a few tens of million of years. Starting from this premise, Hodgson wrote a novel describing a time, millions of years in the future, when the Sun has gone dark.

The Night Land is a classic horror novel by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. As a work of fantasy it belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre. Hodgson also published a much shorter version of the novel, entitled The Dream of X.

The importance of The Night Land was recognized by its later revival in paperback by Ballantine Books, which republished the work in two parts as the forty-ninth and fiftieth volumes of its celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in July, 1972.

H. P. Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” describes the novel as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written”. Clark Ashton Smith wrote of it that “In all literature, there are few works so sheerly remarkable, so purely creative, as The Night Land. Whatever faults this book may possess, however inordinate its length may seem, it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story; and it is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much of actual prophecy may have been mingled with the poesy.”

When the book was written, the nature of the energy source that powers stars was not known: Lord Kelvin had published calculations based on the hypothesis that the energy came from the gravitational collapse of the gas cloud that had formed the sun, and found that this mechanism gave the Sun a lifetime of only a few tens of million of years. Starting from this premise, Hodgson wrote a novel describing a time, millions of years in the future, when the Sun has gone dark.

House of Stairs (1974) is a science fiction novel by William Sleator. Set in a dystopian America in an undefined future, the story records the connections of five sixteen-year-olds who are taken from city orphanages and placed in a building. The building, is a prison and a hospital, has no walls, no ceiling, and no floor: nothing but endless flights of stairs leading nowhere, with no perceivable edge. On one landing is a basin of running water that serves as a toilet, sink and drinking fountain; on another, a machine with lights that occasionally produces food. Without prior preparation or introduction, the five must learn to deal with the others’ disparate personalities, the lack of privacy, their clear helplessness, and a machine that only feeds them under gradually more exacting situations. Certain episodes in the book suggest a scarcity economy, as the backstory of the characters differs based on apparently socioeconomic criteria. One of the characters validates that the food supply is “…real meat…I have had it” ; another has had access to various goods apparently unavailable to others. Themes include suspicion of authority (interpreted as whichever unseen people conduct the experiment) and social breakdown under stress, similar to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The setting is very much implausible, as the building with stairs within it is apparently too large for any of the children to reach an outer boundary. The story is told largely from the point of view of Peter, a slightly slow boy who tends to follow authority. The others are Lola, is a rebellious juvenile delinquent girl; Blossom, an overweight, spoiled girl who grew up amidst wealth but who was recently orphaned; Oliver, a generous, self confident, and arrogant athlete; and Abigail, a pretty girl who is kind but easily misguided and worried about what others think of her. Peter is in awe of Oliver, who resembles a close friend he once had, but bonds closely to Lola, who takes a protective stance toward him from the beginning.

House of Stairs (1974) is a science fiction novel by William Sleator.

Set in a dystopian America in an undefined future, the story records the connections of five sixteen-year-olds who are taken from city orphanages and placed in a building. The building, is a prison and a hospital, has no walls, no ceiling, and no floor: nothing but endless flights of stairs leading nowhere, with no perceivable edge. On one landing is a basin of running water that serves as a toilet, sink and drinking fountain; on another, a machine with lights that occasionally produces food. Without prior preparation or introduction, the five must learn to deal with the others’ disparate personalities, the lack of privacy, their clear helplessness, and a machine that only feeds them under gradually more exacting situations.

Certain episodes in the book suggest a scarcity economy, as the backstory of the characters differs based on apparently socioeconomic criteria. One of the characters validates that the food supply is “…real meat…I have had it” ; another has had access to various goods apparently unavailable to others.

Themes include suspicion of authority (interpreted as whichever unseen people conduct the experiment) and social breakdown under stress, similar to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The setting is very much implausible, as the building with stairs within it is apparently too large for any of the children to reach an outer boundary.

The story is told largely from the point of view of Peter, a slightly slow boy who tends to follow authority. The others are Lola, is a rebellious juvenile delinquent girl; Blossom, an overweight, spoiled girl who grew up amidst wealth but who was recently orphaned; Oliver, a generous, self confident, and arrogant athlete; and Abigail, a pretty girl who is kind but easily misguided and worried about what others think of her. Peter is in awe of Oliver, who resembles a close friend he once had, but bonds closely to Lola, who takes a protective stance toward him from the beginning.

“The Great God Pan” is a novella written by Arthur Machen. A version of the story was published in the magazine Whirlwind in 1890, and Machen revised and extended it for its book publication (together with another story, “The Inmost Light”) in 1894. On publication it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its decadent style and sexual content, although it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Machen’s story was only one of many at the time to focus on Pan as a useful symbol for the power of nature and paganism. The title was taken from the poem “A Musical Instrument” published in 1862 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the first line of every stanza ends “… the great god Pan.” A woman in Wales has her mind destroyed by a scientist’s attempt to enable her to see the god of nature Pan. Years later, a young woman named Helen Vaughan arrives in the London social scene, disturbing many young men and causing some to commit suicide; it transpires that she is the monstrous offspring of the god Pan and the woman in the experiment.

“The Great God Pan” is a novella written by Arthur Machen. A version of the story was published in the magazine Whirlwind in 1890, and Machen revised and extended it for its book publication (together with another story, “The Inmost Light”) in 1894. On publication it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific because of its decadent style and sexual content, although it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Machen’s story was only one of many at the time to focus on Pan as a useful symbol for the power of nature and paganism. The title was taken from the poem “A Musical Instrument” published in 1862 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the first line of every stanza ends “… the great god Pan.”

A woman in Wales has her mind destroyed by a scientist’s attempt to enable her to see the god of nature Pan. Years later, a young woman named Helen Vaughan arrives in the London social scene, disturbing many young men and causing some to commit suicide; it transpires that she is the monstrous offspring of the god Pan and the woman in the experiment.

The Book of the New Sun is a novel in four parts written (1980–83) by science fiction and fantasy author Gene Wolfe. It chronicles the journey and ascent to power of Severian, a disgraced journeyman torturer who rises to the position of Autarch, the one ruler of the free world. Severian, who claims that he has perfect memory, tells the story in first person; the books are presented by Wolfe as a translation of Severian’s writings into contemporary English. The series takes place in the distant future, where the Sun has dimmed considerably and the Earth (referred to in the series as “Urth”) is slowly cooling.

The Book of the New Sun is a novel in four parts written (1980–83) by science fiction and fantasy author Gene Wolfe. It chronicles the journey and ascent to power of Severian, a disgraced journeyman torturer who rises to the position of Autarch, the one ruler of the free world. Severian, who claims that he has perfect memory, tells the story in first person; the books are presented by Wolfe as a translation of Severian’s writings into contemporary English. The series takes place in the distant future, where the Sun has dimmed considerably and the Earth (referred to in the series as “Urth”) is slowly cooling.

The Wasp Factory was the first novel by Scottish writer Iain Banks. It was published in 1984. Written from the first person perspective, it is a deeply unreliable narrative told by sixteen-year-old eunuch Frank Cauldhame, describing his childhood and all that remains of it. Frank observes many shamanistic rituals of his own invention, and it is soon revealed that Frank was the perpetrator of three deaths within his family - all other children and all before he reached the age of ten. As the novel develops, his brother’s escape from a mental hospital and impending return lead on to a violent ending and a twist that undermines all that Frank believed about himself.

The Wasp Factory was the first novel by Scottish writer Iain Banks. It was published in 1984.

Written from the first person perspective, it is a deeply unreliable narrative told by sixteen-year-old eunuch Frank Cauldhame, describing his childhood and all that remains of it. Frank observes many shamanistic rituals of his own invention, and it is soon revealed that Frank was the perpetrator of three deaths within his family - all other children and all before he reached the age of ten. As the novel develops, his brother’s escape from a mental hospital and impending return lead on to a violent ending and a twist that undermines all that Frank believed about himself.

Neuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, notable for being the most famous early cyberpunk novel and winner of the science-fiction “triple crown” — the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award.  It was Gibson’s first novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. The novel tells the story of a washed-up computer hacker hired by a mysterious employer to work on the ultimate hack. The themes which Gibson developed in his early short fiction, the Sprawl setting of “Burning Chrome” and the character of Molly Millions from “Johnny Mnemonic” laid the foundations for the novel. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) was an influence on the novel. Gibson was “intrigued by the exchange in one of the opening scenes where the Warden says to Snake: ‘You flew the wing-five over Leningrad, didn’t you?’ It turns out to be just a throwaway line, but for a moment it worked like the best SF, where a casual reference can imply a lot.” The novel’s street and computer slang dialogue derives from the vocabulary of subcultures, particularly “1969 Toronto dope dealer’s slang, or biker talk.” Gibson heard the term “flatlining” in a bar twenty years before writing Neuromancer and it stuck with him. Author Robert Stone, a “master of a certain kind of paranoid fiction”, was a primary influence on the novel. Neuromancer was commissioned by Terry Carr for the third series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, which was intended to exclusively feature debut novels. Given a year to complete the work, Gibson undertook the actual writing out of “blind animal terror” at the obligation to write an entire novel  – a feat which he felt he was “four or five years away from”. After viewing the first 20 minutes of landmark cyberpunk film Blade Runner (1982) which was released when Gibson had written a third of the novel, he “figured [Neuromancer] was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film.” He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, feared losing the reader’s attention and was convinced that he would be “permanently shamed” following its publication; yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist. He added the final sentence of the novel, “He never saw Molly again”, at the last minute in a deliberate attempt to prevent himself from ever writing a sequel, but ended up doing precisely that with Count Zero (1986), a character-focused work set in the Sprawl alluded to in its predecessor.

Neuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, notable for being the most famous early cyberpunk novel and winner of the science-fiction “triple crown” — the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award.  It was Gibson’s first novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. The novel tells the story of a washed-up computer hacker hired by a mysterious employer to work on the ultimate hack.

The themes which Gibson developed in his early short fiction, the Sprawl setting of “Burning Chrome” and the character of Molly Millions from “Johnny Mnemonic” laid the foundations for the novel. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) was an influence on the novel. Gibson was “intrigued by the exchange in one of the opening scenes where the Warden says to Snake: ‘You flew the wing-five over Leningrad, didn’t you?’ It turns out to be just a throwaway line, but for a moment it worked like the best SF, where a casual reference can imply a lot.” The novel’s street and computer slang dialogue derives from the vocabulary of subcultures, particularly “1969 Toronto dope dealer’s slang, or biker talk.” Gibson heard the term “flatlining” in a bar twenty years before writing Neuromancer and it stuck with him. Author Robert Stone, a “master of a certain kind of paranoid fiction”, was a primary influence on the novel.

Neuromancer was commissioned by Terry Carr for the third series of Ace Science Fiction Specials, which was intended to exclusively feature debut novels. Given a year to complete the work, Gibson undertook the actual writing out of “blind animal terror” at the obligation to write an entire novel  – a feat which he felt he was “four or five years away from”. After viewing the first 20 minutes of landmark cyberpunk film Blade Runner (1982) which was released when Gibson had written a third of the novel, he “figured [Neuromancer] was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film.” He re-wrote the first two-thirds of the book twelve times, feared losing the reader’s attention and was convinced that he would be “permanently shamed” following its publication; yet what resulted was a major imaginative leap forward for a first-time novelist. He added the final sentence of the novel, “He never saw Molly again”, at the last minute in a deliberate attempt to prevent himself from ever writing a sequel, but ended up doing precisely that with Count Zero (1986), a character-focused work set in the Sprawl alluded to in its predecessor.

De Vermis Mysteriis, or Mysteries of the Worm, is a fictional grimoire created by Robert Bloch and incorporated by H. P. Lovecraft into the lore of the Cthulhu Mythos. The tome first appeared in Bloch’s short story “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935), in which a character reads a passage from the book and accidentally summons an extradimensional horror. Bloch, then a teenager, corresponded with Lovecraft about the story prior to its publication, in part to get permission to kill off a character based on the older writer. While giving his enthusiastic blessing, Lovecraft also suggested that the book featured in the story, named by Bloch as Mysteries of the Worm, be referred to instead by the Latin equivalent De Vermis Mysteriis. Lovecraft also provided Bloch with a bit of Latin to use as an invocation from the book: “Tibi, magnum Innominandum, signa stellarum nigrarum et bufaniformis Sadoquae sigillum”—which can be translated as “To you, the great Not-to-Be-Named, signs of the black stars, and the seal of the toad-shaped Tsathoggua” In “The Shambler from the Stars”, De Vermis Mysteriis is described as the work of Ludwig Prinn, an “alchemist, necromancer, [and] reputed mage” who “boasted of having attained a miraculous age” before being burned at the stake in Brussels during the height of the witch trials (in the late 15th or early 16th centuries). Prinn, Bloch writes, maintained that he was captured during the Ninth Crusade in 1271, and attributed his occult knowledge to studying under the “wizards and wonder-workers of Syria” during his captivity. Bloch also associates Prinn with Egypt, writing that “there are legends among the Libyan dervishes concerning the old seer’s deeds in Alexandria.” At the time of his execution for sorcery, Bloch has Prinn living “in the ruins of a pre-Roman tomb that stood in the forest near Brussels…amidst a swarm of familiars and fearsomely invoked conjurations.” In this forest, there were “old pagan altars that stood crumbling in certain of the darker glens”; these altars were found to have “fresh bloodstains” when Prinn was arrested.

De Vermis Mysteriis, or Mysteries of the Worm, is a fictional grimoire created by Robert Bloch and incorporated by H. P. Lovecraft into the lore of the Cthulhu Mythos.

The tome first appeared in Bloch’s short story “The Shambler from the Stars” (1935), in which a character reads a passage from the book and accidentally summons an extradimensional horror.

Bloch, then a teenager, corresponded with Lovecraft about the story prior to its publication, in part to get permission to kill off a character based on the older writer. While giving his enthusiastic blessing, Lovecraft also suggested that the book featured in the story, named by Bloch as Mysteries of the Worm, be referred to instead by the Latin equivalent De Vermis Mysteriis.

Lovecraft also provided Bloch with a bit of Latin to use as an invocation from the book: “Tibi, magnum Innominandum, signa stellarum nigrarum et bufaniformis Sadoquae sigillum”—which can be translated as “To you, the great Not-to-Be-Named, signs of the black stars, and the seal of the toad-shaped Tsathoggua”

In “The Shambler from the Stars”, De Vermis Mysteriis is described as the work of Ludwig Prinn, an “alchemist, necromancer, [and] reputed mage” who “boasted of having attained a miraculous age” before being burned at the stake in Brussels during the height of the witch trials (in the late 15th or early 16th centuries).

Prinn, Bloch writes, maintained that he was captured during the Ninth Crusade in 1271, and attributed his occult knowledge to studying under the “wizards and wonder-workers of Syria” during his captivity. Bloch also associates Prinn with Egypt, writing that “there are legends among the Libyan dervishes concerning the old seer’s deeds in Alexandria.”

At the time of his execution for sorcery, Bloch has Prinn living “in the ruins of a pre-Roman tomb that stood in the forest near Brussels…amidst a swarm of familiars and fearsomely invoked conjurations.” In this forest, there were “old pagan altars that stood crumbling in certain of the darker glens”; these altars were found to have “fresh bloodstains” when Prinn was arrested.

Moonchild is a novel written by the British occultist Aleister Crowley in 1917. Its plot involves a magical war between a group of white magicians, led by the protagonist Simon Iff, and a group of black magicians over an unborn child. It was first published by Mandrake Press in 1929 and its recent edition is published by Weiser. In this work, numerous acquaintances of Crowley appear as thinly disguised fictional characters. Crowley portrays MacGregor Mathers as the primary villain, including him as a character named SRMD, using the abbreviation of Mathers’ magical name. Arthur Edward Waite appears as a villain named Arthwaite, and the unseen head of the Inner Circle of which SRMD was a member, “A.B.” is theosophist Annie Besant. Among Crowley’s friends and allies Allen Bennett appears as Mahatera Phang, Isadora Duncan appears as Lavinia King, and Mary D’Este as Lisa la Giuffria. Cyril Grey is Crowley himself, while Simon Iff is either an idealized version of an older and wiser Crowley or his friend Allen Bennett.

Moonchild is a novel written by the British occultist Aleister Crowley in 1917. Its plot involves a magical war between a group of white magicians, led by the protagonist Simon Iff, and a group of black magicians over an unborn child. It was first published by Mandrake Press in 1929 and its recent edition is published by Weiser.

In this work, numerous acquaintances of Crowley appear as thinly disguised fictional characters. Crowley portrays MacGregor Mathers as the primary villain, including him as a character named SRMD, using the abbreviation of Mathers’ magical name. Arthur Edward Waite appears as a villain named Arthwaite, and the unseen head of the Inner Circle of which SRMD was a member, “A.B.” is theosophist Annie Besant. Among Crowley’s friends and allies Allen Bennett appears as Mahatera Phang, Isadora Duncan appears as Lavinia King, and Mary D’Este as Lisa la Giuffria. Cyril Grey is Crowley himself, while Simon Iff is either an idealized version of an older and wiser Crowley or his friend Allen Bennett.

The Magus (1966) is the first novel written (but second published) by British author John Fowles. It tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, a teacher on a small Greek island. Urfe finds himself embroiled in psychological illusions of a master trickster that become increasingly dark and serious. The novel was a bestseller, partly because it tapped successfully into—and then arguably helped to promote—the 1960s popular interest in psychoanalysis and mystical philosophy. The Magus was the first novel John Fowles wrote but his second to be published after The Collector (1963). He started writing it in the 1950s, originally entitling it The Godgame. He partly based it on his experiences as an English teacher on the Greek island of Spetses. He wrote and rewrote it for twelve years before its publication in 1966, and despite critical and commercial success, continued to rework it until its revised version, published in 1977.

The Magus (1966) is the first novel written (but second published) by British author John Fowles. It tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, a teacher on a small Greek island. Urfe finds himself embroiled in psychological illusions of a master trickster that become increasingly dark and serious.

The novel was a bestseller, partly because it tapped successfully into—and then arguably helped to promote—the 1960s popular interest in psychoanalysis and mystical philosophy.

The Magus was the first novel John Fowles wrote but his second to be published after The Collector (1963). He started writing it in the 1950s, originally entitling it The Godgame. He partly based it on his experiences as an English teacher on the Greek island of Spetses. He wrote and rewrote it for twelve years before its publication in 1966, and despite critical and commercial success, continued to rework it until its revised version, published in 1977.