The Scarlet Plague that biographers and critics have called a "professional decline", from September 1912 to May 1916. In this period, he stopped writing short works and shifted to longer works including "The Abysmal Brute" (1913), "John Barleycorn" (1913), "The Mutiny of the Elsinore" (1914), "The Star Rover" (1915), among others. "The Scarlet Plague" was later reprinted in the February 1949 issue of "Famous Fantastic Mysteries". Jack London was inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story "The Masque of the Red Death". Both Poe's story and London's fall into a genre of apocalyptic fiction featuring a universal plague that nearly
The Masque of the Red Death (play) and locations used in the Masque of the Red Death, and took advantage of the fact that the Old Town Hall building dated back to 1893, 50 years after the publication of the story (treated as a factual account within the narrative), to weave fiction together with reality. Like the story upon which it is based, the Gold-Bug hunt relied on the decryption of ciphers and puzzles to lead the participants to the "treasure", which was finally discovered by a group of participants buried in a garden within the confines of the Battersea Arts Centre, and upon which the Old