A partial version (beginning page 94) is available from Google books

For a time, I had only deigned to explore one area of Lovecraftian fiction, that of course being the works written by Lovecraft himself. In the past year, however, I have broadened my reading of cosmic horror to explore those who influenced Lovecraft, and those who have picked up where he left off.As part of that broadening spectrum of stories, I picked up Chambers' "The King in Yellow", and after that I decided I wanted to explore more about Hastur. In the past month I finally picked up this bo...

Some shorts are easily 4/5 and 5/5, like Chambers' two (The Repairer of Reputations and The Yellow Sign) and The River of Night's Dreaming by Karl Edward Wagner... but there are some 1/5s as well, like mostly anything by August Derleth honestly. I'd give this 3.5/5 if it was possible. I just wish Lin Carter would have kept at rewriting Blish's attempt at The King in Yellow play to verse form, beyond Lin's third act. Along the shore the cloud waves break,The twin suns sink behind the lake,The sha...

"The River of Night's Dreaming" alone makes this book worth it. There are plenty of eerie stories in here and fans of Lovecraft's Mythos and Chamber's King in Yellow stories should find a lot to enjoy. "Haita the Shepherd" by Ambrose Bierce is wonderfully surreal when it's placed in context with the rest of these stories. It's definitely worth a read and I'll be posting synopses of some of the individual stores on Antique Horrors. Those synopses tend to have spoilers, so I won't post them here.

This is the first volume in the set of anthologies of Lovecraftiana edited by Robert M. Price for Chaosium (though the copy I read was the second edition). Though it’s the first in the set, it’s the fifth one I’ve read, and not to put too fine a point on it, the first four were at least a little more focused. This anthology starts by tracing Bierce’s Carcosa through Blish’s partial creation of the insanity-inducing “King in Yellow.” But then suddenly we shift gears and move on to Lovecraft’s “Wh...

There are only two questions which any mythos fan should have about this book: Are the stories any good and does the collection provide considerable illumination regarding the nature of Hastur? The answer is a resounding 'yes' to the former and a resounding 'kinda' to the latter.Although one can hardly blame editor Rober M Price for adhering to the highest standards of quality when selecting tales for this first of Chaosium's 'Cycle' books, the connections between the alien Mi-go and Hastur are

This book ought to be a model for how to properly assemble an anthology of short stories. Unlike other collections that contain high-quality work but are thrown together slap-dash with no real editorial effort(I'm looking at you, Book of Cthulhu books I and II), Chaosium has provided a linear, analytic framework for the stories featured in this collection that leaves the reader feeling as if they grasp the historical and cultural context surrounding the works rather than receiving them as indepe...

From the shores of Leng,to the towers of Dim Carcosa the King of Yellow sits on his tattered throne..

I'm "lem"-ing this book.

The overarching concept behind this collection is to show that there's more to Hastur than Lovecraft, maybe even to bring him to a "one of..." designation.The goal (which was met and exceeded) was to give the history and the chronology of the development of, for lack of a better word, mythos, behind the concept. So while Lovecraft's The Whisperer in darkness is one of the best stories in the collection, it's just that, "one of..."The ones that pop up, aside from the Whisperer, are The Repairer o...

A solid collection of weird stories that are tantalizingly linked over almost a century of the genre. I particularly liked The Return of Hastur by August Derleth. Comments from Editor Robert Price add intriguing historical and literary perspective to the proceedings. I look forward to reading more collections in this series.

A collection of weakly-linked horror tales of vastly variable quality. Some of them are very poor indeed, and most of the better ones are already available to read out of copyright. The context sheds light on the evolution of "Hastur" as a concept, but not as a creature in itself.

nb: I have outlined the contents of each story in this book (without spoilers) at my reading journal blog, so if you are interested, feel free to click here. Some time ago, long before HBO's True Detective was even in the works, I read S.T. Joshi's Chaosium collection of Robert W. Chambers' The Yellow Sign and Other Stories. It was my introduction to King in Yellow, and I was hooked. I had to have more. After doing a little research, I realized that this book (which I already owned) would be a

one of the better books in the chaosium series in my opinion. hastur the unspeakable is one of the most intriguing great old ones and this book shows you where lovecraft's inspiration came from for this character. i think this collection is not just entertaining but the idea for the book itself is well executed, being the most important hastur stories out there and not just a bunch of filler material to pump out another book.

Fantastic!

The Hastur Cycle is a collection of short stories connected to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. This particular collection revolves around Hastur as a god, a city, and finally a Great Old One.I will try to break down my thoughts on each story briefly.1. In Haita the Shepherd, Hastur is the god of the shepherds. A dutiful shepherd begins to lose faith in Hastur and question things about his life when a beautiful stranger appears before him.This was not so much a horror story, but a fable of sorts...

Have you ever found a group of people that also geek out about all the same stuff you do and talk in references? That's what this collection is to King in Yellow fans. The introduction by Price is insightful and well researched as well as his annotations before each story. Granted, some of the middle stories are more HPL focussed. The first few by Bierce, Chambers, Wagner, and Blish are worth buying this book. I'll have to read "In the Court of the Yellow King" in order to finish scratching my i...

Not bad, but not the best. I've never been a big fan of The King in Yellow, but I own it anyway for the collection. It's not a BAD book, but it's nothing out of this world either, at least in my opinion.

I enjoyed the first 4 stories, the ones by Bierce and Chambers. And of course the Lovecraft and Machen pieces. Besides that I did not care for the stories selected.

I've been reading this for years now and finally decided to finish it since I only had 3 or 4 stories left. As with most anthologies there's a couple good stories, a couple of passable stories and some crap. None of these stories really blew me away (the Machen story was my favorite and probably the only 4 star story). Also since these stories are all about Hastur in some way, they get kind of repetitive (especially to someone who's read just about everything Lovecraft ever wrote).