The Maker of Moons is an 1896 short story collection by Robert W. Chambers which followed the publication of Chambers' most famous work, The King in Yellow (1895).
It contained eight new stories, including the title story, one of his weird tales, and several romantic Art Nouveau stories, concluding with two less distinguished weird tales. The latter were subsequently incorporated into the episodic novel In Search of the Unknown.
The first three stories are linked by the theme of a dream wife named Ysonde, and they form a triptych. The weird nature of the first has interesting echoes in the other two, which feature picturesque animal figures, such as a Red Ibis and a disagreeable porcupine.
The story "In The Name of the Most High" is a war story set in the American Civil War. The next two stories are humorous romantic tales with a fishing theme and setting. Chambers' love of natural scenery illuminates most of the stories. The quality throughout is rather fine.
Published by Putnam's, New York and London, in 1896.
The first edition featured a frontispiece with a black and white illustration by Lancelot Speed.
In 1974, Fantasy House published the story "The Maker of Moons" along with "The Demoiselle d'Ys" (from The King in Yellow) in volume 4 of their "Fantasy Reader" series, under the title The Maker of Moons.
In 1954, Shroud, Publishers, reprinted "The Maker of Moons" with a modified ending that omitted the last two paragraphs which linked his story to the later ones in the set, as explained by K J Krueger in the "Postscript".
Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer and artist. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures".
Robert Ervin Howard was an American writer. He wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He created the character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.
Ramsey Campbell is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been adapted into films.
The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by the American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The book is named for the fictional play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed horror stories, and the book has been described by critics such as E. F. Bleiler and T. E. D. Klein as a classic in the field of the supernatural. Lin Carter called it "an absolute masterpiece, probably the single greatest book of weird fantasy written in this country between the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft".
Entertaining Comics, more commonly known as EC Comics, was an American publisher of comic books, which specialized in horror fiction, crime fiction, satire, military fiction, dark fantasy, and science fiction from the 1940s through the mid-1950s, notably the Tales from the Crypt series. Initially, EC was owned by Maxwell Gaines and specialized in educational and child-oriented stories. After Max Gaines' death in a boating accident in 1947, his son William Gaines took over the company and began to print more mature stories, delving into genres of horror, war, fantasy, science-fiction, adventure, and others. Noted for their high quality and shock endings, these stories were also unique in their socially conscious, progressive themes that anticipated the Civil Rights Movement and dawn of 1960s counterculture. In 1954–55, censorship pressures prompted it to concentrate on the humor magazine Mad, leading to the company's greatest and most enduring success. Consequently, by 1956, the company ceased publishing all of its comic lines except Mad.
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895.
Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine founded by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger in late 1922. The first issue, dated March 1923, appeared on newsstands February 18. The first editor, Edwin Baird, printed early work by H. P. Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn, and Clark Ashton Smith, all of whom went on to be popular writers, but within a year, the magazine was in financial trouble. Henneberger sold his interest in the publisher, Rural Publishing Corporation, to Lansinger, and refinanced Weird Tales, with Farnsworth Wright as the new editor. The first issue under Wright's control was dated November 1924. The magazine was more successful under Wright, and despite occasional financial setbacks, it prospered over the next 15 years. Under Wright's control, the magazine lived up to its subtitle, "The Unique Magazine", and published a wide range of unusual fiction.
Carcosa is a fictional city in Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (1886). The ancient and mysterious city is barely described and is viewed only in hindsight by a character who once lived there.
Hugh Barnett Cave was an American writer of various genres, perhaps best remembered for his works of horror, weird menace and science fiction. Cave was one of the most prolific contributors to pulp magazines of the 1920s and '30s, selling an estimated 800 stories not only in the aforementioned genres but also in western, fantasy, adventure, crime, romance and non-fiction. He used a variety of pen names, notably Justin Case under which name he created the antihero The Eel. A war correspondent during World War II, Cave afterwards settled in Jamaica where he owned and managed a coffee plantation and continued his writing career, now specializing in novels as well as fiction and non-fiction sales to mainstream magazines.
Fantasy literature is literature set in an imaginary universe, often but not always without any locations, events, or people from the real world. Magic, the supernatural and magical creatures are common in many of these imaginary worlds. Fantasy literature may be directed at both children and adults.
Matthew Phipps Shiell, known as M. P. Shiel, was a British writer. His legal surname remained "Shiell" though he adopted the shorter version as a de facto pen name.
Weird Fantasy is an American dark fantasy and science fiction anthology comic that was part of the EC Comics line in the early 1950s. The companion comic for Weird Fantasy was Weird Science. Over a four-year span, Weird Fantasy ran for 22 issues, ending with the November–December 1953 issue.
Horror Stories was an American pulp magazine that published tales of the supernatural, horror, and macabre. The first issue was published in January 1935, three years after the weird menace genre had begun with Dime Mystery Magazine. Horror Stories was a sister magazine to Terror Tales, whose first issue came out a year earlier. The title went on to become one of the major pulp magazines of the 1930s.
Gertrude Barrows Bennett, known by the pseudonym Francis Stevens, was a pioneering author of fantasy and science fiction. Bennett wrote a number of fantasies between 1917 and 1923 and has been called "the woman who invented dark fantasy".
Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and usually inspired by mythology and folklore. The term "fantasy" can also be used to describe a "work of this genre", usually literary.
Joseph S. Pulver Sr. was an author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror fiction, noir fiction / hardboiled, and dark fantasy genres. He lived in Germany, and died from COPD and other issues in a German hospital on April 24, 2020.
Western comics is a comics genre usually depicting the American Old West frontier and typically set during the late nineteenth century. The term is generally associated with an American comic books genre published from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Western comics of the period typically featured dramatic scripts about cowboys, gunfighters, lawmen, bounty hunters, outlaws, and Native Americans. Accompanying artwork depicted a rural America populated with such iconic images as guns, cowboy hats, vests, horses, saloons, ranches, and deserts, contemporaneous with the setting.
Russ Cochran was a publisher of EC Comics reprints, Disney comics, and books on Hopalong Cassidy, Chet Atkins, Les Paul, and vacuum tubes. He was a publisher for over 30 years, after quitting his job as a physics professor.
The Tree of Heaven is a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers, author of The King in Yellow, The Maker of Moons, and The Mystery of Choice. Mostly set in New York with a snowy nocturnal backdrop, the stories are light and humorous romantic tales, several of which feature the weird.
The Haunts of Men is a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers, author of The King In Yellow (1895) and The Maker of Moons (1896). The first four tales feature the American Civil War, and most of the stories are set in America with Chambers' love of landscape prevalent. "Ambassador Extraordinary" is set in France, and the last two tales feature less distinguished reappearances of some of the characters in Paris that appeared in The King In Yellow.
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