On Shadows of Carcosa

This is an excellent collection of the early classics of cosmic horror. The pieces lean toward novella length, though there are plenty of short stories too, and not all of them concern Carcosa — but most of these writers wrote, so to speak, in its shadow, with Ambrose Bierce’s hanging long overhead. The single best is Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” which is jaw-dropping, perhaps the most horror-inducing piece of fiction I’ve ever read. Other standouts are Bierce’s own “Moxon’s Master,” R. W. Chambers’s “The Repairer of Reputations,” Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” The texts straddle the primal and the alien, and that’s what makes them so good. I came to the collection while watching the first season of True Detective, where the inspiration is obvious.