The Purple Cloud is a "last man" novel by the British writer M. P. Shiel. It was published in 1901. H. P. Lovecraft later praised the novel as exemplary weird fiction, "delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty."The Purple Cloud is a "last man" novel by the British writer M. P. Shiel. It was published in 1901. H. P. Lovecraft later praised the novel as exemplary weird fiction, "delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty."

M. P. Shiel = Matthew Phipps ShielOne of the strangest books I have ever read—part melodrama, part political treatise, part mystical fantasy. The story is of Richard Hogarth, a man of lofty spirit who on discovering a cache of giant diamonds inside a fallen meteor undertakes a bold project to re-shape the human condition on a global scale. The prose is old-fashioned and ornate, and is at times tiresome, but at other times it is quite wonderful and poetic. You can tell that the author was swinging for the fences, and if he was perhaps a little more hip he might have actually made it out of the park.It's worth mentioning that the book may seem to have anti-Semitic moments, but I don't think that that was the author's intent; Shiel uses the Jewish people as a kind of symbol in the way that another writer might use a myth or a legend as a way of adding meaning and weight to a text. There are Jews in the novel who are stingy, mean and cunning according to the old stereotype, but there are also Jewish protagonists, and in time the Jews people are depicted as a sort of God-chosen, noble race. Of course, one might ask whether it was a good idea for Shiel to bowdlerize a real community of people as a literary device, and I can hardly blame them. Interestingly, the novel prefigures the state of Israel by almost half a century.

The Purple Cloud is a "last man" novel by the British writer M. P. Shiel. It was published in 1901. H. P. Lovecraft later praised the novel as exemplary weird fiction, "delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty."

Matthew Phipps Shiell – known as M. P. Shiel – was a prolific British writer of West Indian descent. His legal surname remained "Shiell" though he adopted the shorter version as a de facto pen name. He is remembered mostly for supernatural and scientific romances. His work was published as serials, novels, and as short stories. The Purple Cloud (1901; 1929) remains his most famous and often reprinted novel.