"The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories
having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings
fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic
fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation
of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby. The most
powerful of its tales, perhaps, is The Yellow Sign, in which is introduced a
silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's."
— from the Introduction by H.P. Lovecraft.