The White Shadow
Robert W. Chambers, "The White Shadow" in The Mystery of Choice (D. Appleton and Co., 1897). Read the story here on Gutenburg One way that Robert W. Chambers creates mystery is by offering alternate timelines or histories that may be real or merely the delusions of a narrator. These sometimes involve Carcosa, but not always. From “The Repairer of Reputations” to “In The Court of the Dragon” to “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” timeslips drive much of the weirdness in The King in Yellow . Arguably, even in “The Yellow Sign,” temporal anomalies are at work to explain the decomposed body of the church watchman discovered at the end of the story. “The White Shadow” from The Mystery of Choice is a wonderfully weird tale about the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, and between life and death. It is an “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge” kind of story that focuses on the “magic second” before death that expands for the protagonist into a year of experiences. Reading “The White ...