In the Court of the Dragon by Robert Chambers (1895, The King In Yellow Short Stories)
Tuesday’s Tale of Terror April 25, 2017
Imagine you are sitting in a 100-year old church. Organ music is resounding throughout the pews. Then suddenly the harmonies and melodies turn sinister. You begin to feel that in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that organ, there is something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chase …something, or someone. Poor devil, you think. Whoever the victim is will not get away. But who is the victim?
We are in the Rue St. Honoré. In this story, our young narrator lives in Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon. This day our young man is at St. Barnabé Church and as he listens to the organ music, as the tones grow angry and bleak, he is overwhelmed by sudden fear. The organist— black figure, white-faced—focuses his intense hatred on our young man. And so, our young man flees in his terror. But escape is not so easy.
Do you believe in mysterious entities of power?
Read In the Court of the Dragon at Ebooks.Adelaide.edu (30-minute read)
Listen to the audio on YouTube.com (24-minutes)
Robert Chambers, an American fiction writer, known for his horror and fantasy short stories in the collection The King in Yellow, published in 1895 during the rise of spiritualism. In H.P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural in Literature, he wrote of Robert Chamber’s work: “Very genuine … brings fright, madness and spectral tragedy.”
Here is a taste of Chambers descriptive powers in his story The White Shadow: There it lay, a hasin of silver and blue. Sweetheart had started to her feet, speechless, one hand holding to my shoulder, the other clasped to her breast. And now, as the road wound through the hills and down to the coast, long stretches of white sand skirted the distant cliffs, and over the cliffs waved miles and miles of yellow gorse. A cluster of white and gray houses lay in the hollow to the left almost at the mouth of the river, and beyond, the waves were beating in the bar—beating the same rhythm which we were to hear so long there together, day and night. There was not a boat to be seen, not a creature, nor was there any sign of life save for the smoke curling from a cottage chimney below. The ocean lay sparkling beneath, and beyond its deeper blue melted into the haze on the horizon.
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Other Reading Web Sites to Visit
Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews
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Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine
HorrorAddicts.net Horror Novel Reviews HorrorSociety.com
Monster Librarian HorrorTalk.com
Rob Around Books The Story Reading Ape Blog
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