I wanted to take a brief moment to explain Pallid Mask Press' mission. Ask anyone in the street who H.P. Lovecraft was and I reckon you'd get a 10-20% hit rate of recognition. But ask about Arthur Machen or Robert W. Chambers and this drops down to (waves a mathematical finger in the air) 1%. Aside from people who hang in certain hobbyist groups, recognition of the old horror masters is low.
This saddens me. There are hundreds, if not thousands of stories out there by the true masters of literary terror that go unread or unrecognised by people who may just love them. Horror films tend to gross much higher than their budget - there's an appetite here. The highest grossing horror flick ever came out this year in the form of Stephen King's It - directly inspired by Lovecraft, who was in turn inspired by other great writers of the macabre.
We're curating and packaging up stories that have remained hidden from the mass public in a way that we hope will make them curious about these books. We want to provide context and clarity in our collected stories through introductions from people who have crossover appeal but live these stories as much as we do. We have an amazing designer on the team to create covers that fit into the modern literary market. Too many people republish old horror books without really offering anything more - we don't want to do that.
With The King in Yellow, the first book we're working on, we're looking at what more we can add. Can we offer a bit of history by including An Inhabitant of Carcosa by Bierce? Is the current order of stories the most engaging? Can we offer further artwork to bring these tales to life?
We're excited to have the opportunity to share these stories with people who may have never considered reading something from the early 1900s. It should be a good ride.
