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I've heard that... and if you read the Chaosium collection, none of his other weird fiction touched The King In Yellow, either. Yet he was a huge bestseller in his day, so he must have read his audience accurately. People tend to judge him based on his King In Yellow reputation (meaning they think he was a master of horror), not realizing that was just one of his many books. If anything, he was a mainstream writer who went down this utterly unique detour, and then never again felt the need to do so.

One story I did find interesting outside the KIY is "The Harbour Master." It literally anticipates The Creature From The Black Lagoon by decades... a fish man falls for a pretty young woman, and it's up to the narrator to save her from his clutches.

One or two more of his stories had sections or ideas that were weird enough to sustain interest, but on the whole Chambers didn't hold a candle to the other pre-Lovecraft writers: Machen, Hodgson, James, Blackwood or even Shiel. Lovecraft didn't regard Chambers' work too highly, although he felt the KIY was a masterpiece.

When he was on, though, he was ON. I love the beginning of "The Repairer of Reputations." It not only predicted a war with Germany 20 years before it happened, it spends a lengthy paragraph describing the NY (I believe it's New York... haven't read it in a while) of the future. And then Chambers slips in one tiny detail about the suicide assistance booths or whatever they were called. The reader thinks, "Wait... what?" It's a wonderful moment, and the whole story is just odd, and lives up to the weird promise of that opening.

For the record, my story references "The Yellow Sign" and deals with the modern view of The King In Yellow himself, as the RPG Gamers and Lovecraft/Derleth disciples see him, with quite a bit of my own views as to how he would be if he existed. I had fun writing it.