The Mystery of Choice: Annotated Edition
Two years after The King in Yellow, and Lovecraft never mentioned it.
In 1897 Robert W. Chambers published eight pieces that do not match: three linked tales of a Breton fishing village, two prose poems in which almost nothing happens except death, a violent story about a man who survives his own lynching, a deadpan sea monster hoax certified by scientists who do not exist, and a closing poem.
They do not match because the title is the instruction. Every one of them is a choice, and the consequence arriving late and from the wrong direction.
The reason to own it is the first three. The Purple Emperor is a murder mystery among butterfly collectors and it is genuinely funny. The Messenger takes the same village, the same cast and the same easy comic voice, digs a skull out of a garden with a bullet hole in the forehead, and opens a sixteenth century curse with a family name in it. The reader who has just finished the first story already knows that family. That is the whole design, and it only works in order.
This annotated edition includes:
All eight pieces, complete, in Chambers' own 1897 arrangement
His dedication, his opening poem and his envoi, set as verse
The epigraph he placed at the head of every piece, restored in place
An original introduction, a headnote before all eight, and a glossary of his Brittany
The Messenger, which belongs beside anything in The King in Yellow
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