Criticism and Legacy
H. P. Lovecraft said of Chambers in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith,
- "Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans – equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them."
Despite his effective later abandonment of the weird supernatural tale, Chambers's early works heavily influenced Lovecraft's tales.
Frederic Taber Cooper commented,
- "So much of Mr Chambers's work exasperates, because we feel that he might so easily have made it better."
A critical essay on Chambers's horror and fantasy work appears in S. T. Joshi's book The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004).
Chambers' novel The Tracer of Lost Persons was adapted into a long-running (1937–54) old-time radio crime drama, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, by legendary soap opera producers Frank and Anne Hummert.
Chambers' The King in Yellow has inspired many modern authors, including Karl Edward Wagner, Joseph S. Pulver, Lin Carter, James Blish, Michael Cisco, Ann K. Schwader, Robert M. Price and Galad Elflandsson.
Read more about this topic: Robert W. Chambers
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