2021 Reprint of the 1895 Edition. Science Fiction critic and scholar E. F. Bleiler called this work "the most important book in American supernatural fiction between Poe and the Moderns." With its strange, imaginative blend of horror, science fiction, romance and lyrical prose, Chamber's book is a classic masterpiece of world fiction. It is a series of vaguely connected stories linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy to all those who read it.