E. Hoffmann Price 20 min read

Diane, wearied wife of the collector Hammersmith Clarke, presides over rooms rich with ancient Persian rugs, one of which, a strange and beautiful weaving, holds a dark secret from Samarcand.

E. Hoffmann Price's 1929 story is an atmospheric Oriental fantasy-horror tale. Lush, exotic, superbly told. Read it for a richly textured weird tale steeped in the lore of the East by a connoisseur of the exotic, a haunted antique rug, an ancient enchantment, and a creeping supernatural menace, in the ornate, sensuous style of the classic pulps.

In its time

Published in 1929, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

20 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Hugh Rankin