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    The King in Yellow
    The King in Yellow
    The King in Yellow
    Ebook271 pages4 hours

    The King in Yellow

    By Robert W. Chambers

    3.5/5

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    With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies.

    'I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with horror which at all times assails me yet'.

    With its strange, imaginative blend of horror, science fiction, romance and lyrical prose, Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow is a classic masterpiece of weird fiction. This series of vaguely connected stories is linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madness and spectral tragedy to all those who read it. An air of futility and doom pervade these pages like a sweet insidious poison. Dare you read it?

    This collection has been called the most important book in American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. H. P. Lovecraft, creator of the famed Cthulu mythos, whose own fiction was greatly influenced by this book stated that The King in Yellow 'achieves notable heights of cosmic fear'.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781848703964
    Author

    Robert W. Chambers

    Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933) was an American author and painter best known for his short story collection The King in Yellow (1895). Born in Brooklyn, Chambers studied art in Paris and was a professional illustrator before he turned to writing. In addition to The King in Yellow, his supernatural tales include The Maker of Moons (1896) and The Mystery of Choice (1897). Later in his career, Chambers wrote bestselling romances and historical novels. 

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    Reviews for The King in Yellow

    3.5/5

    26 ratings23 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An erratic collection published in 1885, ranging from "flavor of life" pieces about contemporary art students in France to war and romance to the truly weird. They also range from the mediocre, to the effective, to the masterful, but never descend to the truly bad. Worth reading even without the acknowledged place of Chanbers as someone who influenced later authors of horror. "The Repairer of Reputations" is an exceptional story. Also contains an Introduction by S.T. Joshi, some sparse endnotes, and some reprints of critics on Chamber's work, including contemporary reviews and an excerpt from Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature".
    • 5/5
      This book is chiefly known for its opening quartet of stories of eldritch horrors and macabre dystopias. Some works contain only those four, which may well satisfy the majority of readers who (like myself) are drawn to it due to the thread it weaves through the works of others, most famously H.P. Lovecraft. However that does the author a disservice. Chambers collected these stories together and intended them to be read as a complete work.Doing that, you appreciate the arc he takes from the futurist dystopia of The Repairer of Reputations, with its claustrophobic feeling of paranoia, through the subsequent alchemical and supernatural tales, onto the fifth story, a folkloric fairytale, a short set of Gibran-like (though simultaneously unlike) prose poems, and so gradually into the historical world of everyday reality, with its wars and romance, comedy and pathos. An expert writer who deserves recognition for more than horror.
    • 4/5
      DESTINYI came to the bridge which few may pass."Pass!" cried the keeper, but I laughed, saying, "There is time;" and he smiled and shut the gates.To the bridge which few may pass came young and old. All were refused. Idly I stood and counted them, until, wearied of their noise and lamentations, I came again to the bridge which few may pass.Those in the throng about the gates shrieked out, "He comes too late!" But I laughed, saying, "There is time.""Pass!" cried the keeper as I entered; then smiled and shut the gates.I have wanted to read this book of short stories for a long time, as I have heard it mentioned as a good example of weird fiction. There are three types of story in this book. Stories which refer to the notorious play called The King in Yellow, which send anyone who reads it mad, stories that are like snippets of dreams, and stories of American art students living in Paris (as the author himself did) and falling in love with various unsuitable women. These are mostly more realistic, but there is some overlap with the weird fiction of the first few stories. The first story, The Restorer of Reputations, gets the book off to a strong start and is the only one that I had read before. I might have given it four stars if not for the art student stories, but it's a 3.5 star book for me overall.
    • 4/5
      Finally reading this one, the book that inspired H.P. Lovecraft in his story creation of pushing the weird and horrible, especially in the way that Chambers keeps the horror within the speculative, leaving the audience to picture just how horrible the effects of reading "The King in Yellow" actually are.My only problem with this book is that not every story continues the title's influence. While the argument could be made that the stories are all interconnected through the artist characters (either through location or names mentioned in previous tales that connect them to later characters and places), but the sudden switch in tone is a bit off-putting, especially when Chambers starts with such a powerful story in "The Repairer of Reputations." And while he does arrange the stories thematically, with "The Demoiselle D'Ys" and "The Prophet's Paradise" bridging the gap between the supernatural tales and the straight-up romances ("The Demoiselle D'Ys" being both supernatural and romance), the overall effect can leave the reader underwhelmed.Still, overall an enjoyable read, and the stories within what has come to be called "The Yellow Mythos" are truly horrifying in their telling.
    • 3/5
      I don't know what to think. I liked most of the stories but there is no real 'whole' about this book. Some of the stories touch each other, but throwing all of these together seems rather random.
    • 4/5
      A bit conflicted on this title. Another reviewer called the collection "uneven" and that says it pretty well. Of the four actual "King in Yellow" stories, I thought two were pretty good, one wasn't bad, and one was not great. There is also a three page "story" filled with repetition that forced me to skim half the lines because holy crap irritating. The other five stories are all romances, to one degree or another. Frankly, I think Lovecraft and the editor of my edition are both idiots when they claim Chambers a failure by taking the "easy route" of writing romances after not achieving the same sort of success in supernatural/horror after this work. Personally I found the romances to be better written than most of the rest in here. I am a huge horror fan; I do not read romances. But it was his romances that engaged me more and kept me intrigued. Therefore I would say he made the wise choice to do what he had the better talent for.All in all, I'm glad to see what provided a big chunk of Lovecraft's inspiration, but I would hesitate to recommend this to a casual reader.
    • 3/5
      I couldn't find the particular print of this that I have because it's Powell's specific. This thing is public domain and too obscure to be in print by a mainstream publisher so there a lot of different little POD type versions floating around.Most people's entry point to this is going to be knowing of it being referenced from Lovecraft. In fact, it's notable for being the originator of the Lovecraftian device of the "obscure grimoire" which is described obliquely, has its contents only hinted at, and which per motif of harmful sensation drives its readers insane. The eponymous fictional book itself sounds very Lovecraftian, taking place in a decadent civilization on a foreign planet and centering around a semi-divine figure of obscure horror. However the rest of the horror stories that feature that book are much more conventional ghost stories in their other respects. With the possible exception of Repairer of Reputations which is my favorite of the lot due to its use of an elaborate alternate timeline setting that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot and exists only for ornamental or obfuscatory purposes (kind of like Ada's).Only half of the stories in the book are even horror stories though. The other half don't mention the King in Yellow at all, have no real horror elements and are more slice of life picaresques about bohemian expatriate American artists living in 1900s - 1910s Paris. They're actually pretty charming and I think I like them better than Chamber's horror stories to be honest. They don't quite reach the level of Wodehousian but the better ones edge near it.
    • 3/5
      Chambers has a nice narrator's voice, but he is so busy explaining everything around the main characters that the scary stuff that happens sort of evaporates in the waterfall of words that he uses. That diminishes the horror effect of the King in Yellow and the Yellow Sign when used in the stories. Funny that the stories in which the King is merely referenced, worked better for me than the ones in which the actual presence of King, Play or Sign featured.
    • 5/5
      The fame of this book rests, deservedly so, on the first four stories. Their mysterious and oppresive atmosphere has inspired multiple authors of horror and weird fiction, most notably, H.P. Lovecraft. The fifth story seems perfect for a Twilight Zone episode. The other stories only interest resides in their portrayal of the life of Art students in XIX century fin-de-siecle Paris. The stories are well written and have internal consistency. I was pleasantly surprised to discover an author I had never read before.

      The Arc Dreams Publishing edition is beautifully bound, and has many useful annotations. It is illustrated by Paraguayan artist Samuel Araya. My only minor complaint is that the illustration for the story "The Yellow Sign" is a knock off from Arnold Böcklin's "Toteninsel" and there is no attribution. Böcklin made five versions of his painting so I see no problem in Araya's beautiful and haunting interpretation, only that one of the notes should have pointed this out.
    • 4/5
      A very good annotated version of Chambers's work which makes it more accessible in many ways, but the sparse nature of the art, and the deft, yet pared back story line, makes me crave more detail. It's the only thing that I'd complain about, otherwise a very good collection & interpretation of Chambers's work. You can see how it inspired but didn't over power Lovecraft.
    • 4/5
      The first four stories (The Repairer of Reputations, The Mask, In the Court of the Dragon, The Yellow Sign) of this book are great horror pieces. I can see where Lovecraft gets inspiration from Chambers. The rest are not quite of the same nature and thusly, I did not enjoy them as much.
    • 3/5
      Decent collection of short stories. Seemed to lose some steam in the later stories.
    • 3/5
      An uneven collection, starting out with tales of occult, then diving into stories of romance. The 4 stories revolving around Carcosa and the madness inducing play "The King in Yellow" are pretty creepy, a la Edgar Allen Poe. The romances? Not my cup of tea.
    • 3/5
      One of those books that's always discussed in spec fic circles, so I wanted to try it.It's a decent read, but inconsistent. The main thing is that the nature of the stories changes considerably over the course of the book, and as such, will probably appeal to different people.The first four are deeply weird stories. They combine alternative history, a very sinister supernatural, and lyrical writing, with excellent results. All are macabre and intriguing. The Repairer of Reputations is a really effective tale of the unreliable narrator, which paints a fascinating and alarming picture of madness. It's not until right at the end that you can begin to unravel the complex delusions that intertwine, and find the very foundations of the story are shifting sand. This is already one of my favourite weird tales.The titular King in Yellow features in The Yellow Sign. It's actually a much less strange story, essentially just a twist of the supernatural curse. However, it's very well-executed, with compelling writing that really sells the repulsiveness of the watchman, and the dogged thoughts that will not leave our protagonist alone. I confess, though, that all the build-up this story has elsewhere had led me to expect a far weirder tale.The Court of the Dragon, The Mask and The Damoiselle d'Ys are less striking, though all of them are solid supernatural tales. There's a little flavour of the weird to Court, which I liked a great deal, and all are well-written and drew me along easily.Beyond this, the collection moves into essentially historical writing, with the odd supernatural touch. The stories are a little grim, centring on Bohemian lives of poverty and hardship, even while the rich and idle move amongst them. One is a war story of Paris under siege. They aren't without interest, and the writing remains good, but having come for weirdness I found little to appeal in them. In particular, the several tales of Bohemian artists of them felt like style over substance, for very little seemed to happen, either in plot or in character development. That being said, they do evoke their atmosphere very effectively. Personally I found them of limited interest and was glad to finish them.On the whole, this feels like a slightly odd collection that's neither one thing nor t'other. I would recommend the first few tales to those interested in weird fiction, and the last few to literary types.
    • 5/5
      The first four stories are macabre in tone, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents, and involve a fictional two-act play of the same title as the book, a play that is as accursed to those who possess it as the Necronomicon would later be. The first story "The Repairer of Reputations", is set in an imagined future 1920s America (and as such the book can be considered to fall into the Sci-Fi genre). The next three are set in Paris at the same time.

      The color yellow signifies the decadent and aesthetic attitudes that were fashionable at the end of the 19th century, typified by such publications as The Yellow Book, a literary journal associated with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. It has also been suggested that the color yellow represents quarantine — an allusion to decay, disease, and specifically mental illness. For instance, the famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", involving a bedridden woman's descent into madness, was published shortly before Chambers' book.

      The other stories in the book do not quite follow the same macabre theme of the first four, or their connection to the fictional Yellow King, although some are linked to the preceding stories via their Parisien setting and artistic protagonists. What they all have in common however is the underlying theme of obsession.

      This is not only an historic work of American fiction, but an unique work of literature that in my view surpasses in excellence and originality any of the works it later inspired (eg the works of HP Lovecraft).
    • 3/5
      Chambers is the forgotten member of the pantheon of weird fiction, whose story The Repairer of Reputations, was praised by Lovecraft. That and The Mask, The Court of the Dragon and The Yellow Sign all fit together in a loose mythology concerning the dreaded play The King in Yellow and the bizarre events the follow it. The remaining stories are a mixed collection that range from passable ghost stories to clichéd romance. Lovecraft was right in calling Chambers a fallen titan since it's clear that much of his talent for weird fiction was wasted in the more profitable field of romance genre fiction.
    • 3/5
      Robert Chambers probably would not be remembered today without H. P. Lovecraft. The sole title his is now recognized for is The King in Yellow. Like most literary works, it was drifting into the dark and cold zone of cultural oblivion. Then he was caught in the gravity well of that coalescing star of weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft. And, once illuminated by Lovecraft’s in his Supernatural Horror in Literature, this work became sort of a bright satellite beckoning Lovecraft fans to explore it.But Chambers’ book is one of those moons with only one face of any interest.To be sure, there is the appearance, in several connected stories, of the sinister effects and reputation of the titular volume and its enigmatic references to the Pallid Mask and Carcosa and Hastur and the lake of Hali. And the notion of such a book definitely inspired Lovecraft to create his more famous book of blasphemy, the Necronomicon.But that’s only half the book, five weird stories. This group of stories is just connected enough to justify reading in order.“The Repairer of Reputations” first seems to be an unexpected piece of science fiction, the future world of 1920 as imagined in 1895 with attendant projections of Progressive-era politics, turn of the century American imperialism, and contemporary anti-Semitism. Taken on those terms alone, it’s interesting, but we also get a plot about a mysterious Mr. Wilde who has allegedly built up, via social coercion and blackmail, a vast network of political control. Such a powerful network, in fact, that the artist protagonist of the story dreams of using it to usurp his cousin’s place as heir to the Imperial Dynasty of America. Or maybe not. Not everything is as it seem,s and some of the clues to that are in later stories.“The Mask”’s plot – hinging on an artist who has discovered a way of petrifying living matter while preserving its most delicate structures – has little interest and kind of a sappy ending. However, the bits expanding Chambers’ mythology and the mystery of the King in Yellow make it worth reading.“In the Court of the Dragon” is another slight story. After reading The King in Yellow, its hero encounters a menacing organist at a church service and begins to see the threatening man everywhere. As with “The Mask”, the real interest is the tantalizing bits we get about “the towers of Carcosa”.“The Yellow Sign” is justifiably the most anthologized of the stories here and the high point of the book. Like most of the stories in the book, it involves an artist. Outside his studio, he sees a young man who reminds him of a “coffin-worm”. His favorite model, for whom he has great affection, tells him of a dream she had with the same man driving a hearse with the artist as its dead cargo. Chambers not only packs plenty of weirdness in, gives us the largest description of the contents of The King in Yellow of any story here, but also gives us an ending which I suspect influenced Lovecraft’s work.“The Demoiselle D’Ys” eschews the usual Paris or New York City settings of the other stories, but it’s a standard and predictable time-slip romance.And that’s it for the book’s interest as weird fiction. We then get a bunch of enigmatic vignettes and poems and then a batch of uninteresting and forgettable romantic stories of American artists in Paris. To be fair, though, there is one interesting part in “The Street of the First Shell” set, it seems, during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. There is an extended passage in part three when the hero joins a French army attempting a breakout. It is an eerie account with a supernatural quality in its descriptions of the fog-shrouded battle, the confusion, and vivid bits of description.So, for those who are interested in Carcosa and the related bits of Chambers’ mythology (actually some of it comes from Ambrose Bierce), the first half of this book is a must read. For those just looking for good quality weird fiction, just read “The Repairer of Reputations” and “The Yellow Sign”.
    • 5/5
      ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living god.’The King in Yellow is a book containing nine short stories, four of which are interrelated (and the subject of this review); they are, ‘The Repairer of Reputations,’ ‘The Mask,’ ‘In the Court of the Dragon,’ and ‘The Yellow Sign.’ The remaining five stories are (somewhat bizarrely) romances of a Francophile sort that are stale and wooden and worth very little of one’s time. The four stories mentioned above—the King in Yellow cycle, proper—are some of the most astoundingly original pieces of short fiction in all of American literature.A profound influence on the work of Lovecraft and other ‘mythos’ writers of the early 20th Century, The King in Yellow begins with one of the most elemental of Gothic premises: a book that poisons. The King in Yellow, you see, is actually not a collection of stories at all; it is a play within a collection of stories—a play entirely denounced by both pulpit and press: a play capable of opening the mind to truths of such wicked import that to look upon them once is to look upon the face of madness; and this play trickles through the skeleton of each narrative in the King in Yellow cycle: a constant and sweetly sinister miasma that corrupts body, mind, and the very ethers of soul and sanity.Through a quartet of stories, Robert W. Chambers—a man of remarkable, if briefly employed, vision—sustains a sense of dread only occasionally matched by the great talents he would inspire several decades later. Written in the fin de siècle period and gently touched by the influences of Bierce, Wilde, and Machen, Chambers’ near-revolutionary breed of cosmic terror is so bleak, atmospheric, and saturated with the cloak of doom that to dip into The King in Yellow is almost to taste the madness described therein; it is one of the most relentlessly disturbing works of fiction I have ever encountered. The fevered descent that Chambers has titled ‘The Repairer of Reputations’ is the most successful story in the cycle and opens it, establishing its necessary mythology and tone; in many ways it simultaneously foreshadows not only the horror work of Lovecraft and his ilk, but also the dystopian nightmares of Orwell and Huxley (and, in fact, the vision that reverberates throughout the entire King in Yellow cycle actually startles with its prophecy, as if the reader himself had fallen into the same insidious hypnosis that the play described therein is reputed to induce). The opening story is a brilliant piece of fiction in and of itself, with subtle hints throughout the tale suggesting its jarring and brutally ambiguous ending early on (but to describe any more would rob the story of its impact, so I’ll digress).The remainder of the cycle picks up where ‘The Repairer of Reputations’ leaves off, examining situations that occasionally make subtle reference to each other without ever explicitly crossing-over. ‘The Mask,’ which is the most accessible of the quartet, echoes Wilde with more insistence; ‘In the Court of the Dragon’ is terrifying and otherworldly stuff that waxes more sinister each time one returns to it. The closing story of the cycle, ‘The Yellow Sign,’ is the most popular with anthologists and was the most influential on later authors; it is one of the grimmest, most thoroughly desolate pieces of fiction I have ever read. Chambers’ prolific literary output has largely been forgotten (excepting this, his masterpiece): and perhaps this is rightly so, given most of his work’s insipid, commercial triviality. The menace he nourishes to such ‘notable heights of cosmic fear’ (to quote Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature) is largely missing from his other work (which can be sampled in several of the later, unrelated stories in The King in Yellow). But The King in Yellow is enough: there are so few works of such visionary genius in the canon of spectral literature that to define truly pioneering work is really quite easy—and Chambers’ genius ranks alongside Walpole, Poe, and Maturin for sheer originality and durability: for the King in Yellow cycle is intelligent, haunting, and exquisitely unnerving in a way that few ‘story cycles’ have maintained.A product of the same decade that spawned Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Turn of the Screw, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Salome, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Sorrows of Satan, and Trilby, The King in Yellow is part of that great fabric of decadent, brilliant, and eerily fresh fiction that we have called fin de siècle. While other works remain firm in their categorization, The King in Yellow is one of the few works of the 1890s to remain entirely unclassifiable: it is at once decadent and austere, anarchic and conventional, sagacious and utterly indolent. Above all else, though, it is profound beyond words: a kind of saturnine mirror of its own content, waiting to suffocate thought beneath the wings of some pythonic ‘Other.’ The King in Yellow is darkness—darkness and the gulf of nihility that broods beyond us: deep in the sky, where strange gods sleep. It will haunt you, certainly—but that breath of contagion is sweet; the empyrean heights to which it aspires—the heights that Lovecraft would shatter some time later—are as full of humbling gloom as that later luminary’s work, and just as insistent in the totality of their vision. Unlike Lovecraft, however, Chambers’ opus marvels in the sheer ambiguity of cosmic terror, never shedding a harsh light upon its subjects or delving too deeply into the complexity of mythology that the Lovecraftian throng would explore with such brilliance. But this is not a failing—if anything, the briefness and laconicism of the King in Yellow quartet is an important part of its beauty and overall success: it is the blueprint of an entire movement—a real-life parallel of the terrors posited within its pages.
    • 4/5
      You would be well advised to treat the short stories in this collection as two distinct sets,plus a one-off .The first set of six are excellent tales of horror and the supernatural,connected by a manuscript known as 'The King in Yellow'. All who read it are affected by it in terrible ways,often driven mad and suffering strange delusions. I would recommend these to anyone who favours the writings of Poe,Lovecraft or Bierce ,as you will find many similarities between them.The 'one-off' is a short piece called 'The Prophet's Paradise',and consists of eight fragments of prose,which frankly I could make little sense of. The most I can say is that they reminded me somewhat of the works of Oscar Wilde.The final three stories are very different from the rest,in that I suppose you would term them as historical romances. They seemed to take a long time to get nowhere and were personally of little interest to me.The book is well worth reading however for the six early stories,which although extremely strange,are nevertheless fine additions to the horror genre.
    • 2/5
      I only read the first four stories, as I didn't find the other poems and stories particularly interesting.The first four stories: The Repairer Of Reputations, The Mask, In The Court Of The Dragon and The Yellow Sign all focus on the play "The King in Yellow". Anyone who reads the second act either goes insane or meets a grisly end.This book obviously inspired H.P Lovecraft, as it contains many of Lovecraft's themes such as cosmic horror, dangerous books, and insanity.
    • 2/5
      A couple of good stories. I especially liked the creepy first book, but the rest were just s-so. I understand this is a classic of the horror genre, but I didn't enjoy it.
    • 4/5
      A collection of short stories, possible dream fragments, and poetry. Some of the poetry isn't great, but there were a few good poems. What appear to be dream fragments are occasionally spooky and feel a bit trippy. There's some good stories in here, but as others have commented, the last two stories are long and only match in that they take place in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Not bad, but jarring with the strange tone of the rest of the book. It would be interesting to find out precisely why Chambers included them. Was it an attempt to boost sale of the other material? From what I understand the last two stories reflected the type of material he was popular for at the time.I read a digitized copy of the first version from the Internet Archive. (I think it was from there, but I can't remember for sure. It may have been from Google Books).
    • 3/5
      This book started off very well, but was of patchy quality overall. It is a collection of short stories, several of which are thematically linked by their setting (Paris just prior to the First World War), and especially by an intriguing and damned book-within-a-book, the eponymous King in Yellow. This is a play which sends its readers mad from reading it, though copies of the work seem fairly easy to come by in the sybaritic demimonde of the Paris art scene. It is easy to see the influence of this madness-inducing tome on later writers like H.P. Lovecraft. The stories which concern the King in Yellow are generally good, moody and sinister. We never learn the contents of the play; only see the effects on those who dare to read it -- never good.The later stories however, are less weird and more romantic and in my opinion none the better for it. They don't really fit with the more powerful tales in the book, apart from their French setting. A couple of stories are barely longer than a page or two and have no depth at all. Read the first half of this book, up to and including the tale 'The King in Yellow' of course and you will probably have sampled the best of it.

    Book preview

    The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers

    THE KING

    IN YELLOW

    Robert W. Chambers

    with an Introduction by

    David Stuart Davies

    The King in Yellow first published by

    Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2010

    Published as an ePublication 2011

    ISBN 978 1 84870 396 4

    Wordsworth Editions Limited

    8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

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    For my husband

    ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

    with love from your wife, the publisher

    Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

    not just for me but for our children,

    Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

    INTRODUCTION

    Beware reading this book. You do so at your own peril. To allow your eyes to wander freely over the text could bring disastrous results. Your mind, your personality and your life will be affected in a most dramatic fashion. Well, that is the premise behind this fascinating collection of stories by R. W. Chambers. ‘The King in Yellow’ of the title is in fact a printed play script which takes a hypnotic malevolent hold on all those who read it. To explain further would not be fair for it will rob you of the surprises and the creeping horror found in these unusual stories, and I really wouldn’t want you to miss out on the pleasing terror that awaits you.

    The book is certainly mysterious, but perhaps the greatest mystery surrounding The King in Yellow is why it is so little known today. American literary scholar E. F. Bleiler called it ‘the most important book in American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns’. There can be no doubt that the book is a classic of the fantasy/supernatural genre, and yet in recent years it has been neglected by publishers and readers alike. Until now.

    The King in Yellow was penned by Robert William Chambers (1865–1933), an American author and artist whose life was as fascinating as his work. He was born in Brooklyn, but he studied art in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts from 1886 to 1893, and his work was displayed there as early as 1889. His visual brilliance is mirrored in his fiction where scenes are evocatively and colourfully created as though they were works of art. Also, while in Paris Chambers associated with intellectuals, aesthetes and bohemians and a meld of these influences can be found in most of his work. Obviously visionary pursuits ran in the family, for his brother was the influential and progressive architect Walter Broughton Chambers. In fact The King in Yellow is dedicated to Walter.

    On returning to the United States R. W. Chambers succeeded in selling his illustrations to various smart periodicals such as Life, Truth and Vogue. And then, for reasons that have never been made clear, he decided to channel his artistic energies into writing. Initially, he composed a series of short pieces on bohemian life in Paris for a collection entitled In the Quarter (1894). It was in 1895 that Chambers published one of his earliest forays into fiction and perhaps his greatest, The King in Yellow. In essence the book is a collection of short stories written in an elegant, witty and often disturbing style; nearly all the narratives are set in either Paris or New York, cities which meant a great deal to the author. The book has been categorised as early horror fiction or Victorian Gothic fiction, but these terms are too narrow in their definition of the work. The stories reflect Chambers’s wide-ranging influences and interests and contain elements of mythology, fantasy, science fiction and romance. The first four stories are loosely connected, dealing as they do with unfortunate souls who have dared to glance into the text of an infamous play entitled The King in Yellow, from which tantalising brief extracts are offered. Their encounter with the texts brings dark havoc to the lives of these luckless individuals.

    H. P. Lovecraft, a great admirer of the book, later adopted the same tactic for his own writing, allowing readers a few unsettling and provocative glimpses into his spurious but nevertheless seemingly real grimoire – his Necronomicon, which among other things, contains an account of the Old Ones, an ancient race of strange beings, and the means for summoning them.

    The author of the dangerous play, The King in Yellow, in Chambers’s book, we are told, has been denounced ‘from pulpit and press’. He is rumoured to have shot himself, but probably still lives, because as one character observes, ‘bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that’.

    Chambers’s evil text The King in Yellow features most prominently in the first story, ‘The Repairer of Reputations’, which sets the mood for the rest of the book. It lures the reader into the narrative initially by novelty – the presentation of the future as seen by Chambers writing at the end of the nineteenth century. We are in the New York of 1920 where a fascistic government has built ‘Lethal Chambers’ for those who wish to escape life by committing suicide:

    The exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of national self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalisation and the gradual centralisation of power in the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity.

    But this tone of dark satire tinged with elements of science fiction soon shifts and the focus turns to the narrator who, chancing to read Act 1 of The King in Yellow, in which ‘the essence of purest poison worked’, is compelled to fling the book into the fireplace. However, as fate has it, it falls open and he catches a glimpse of the opening words of the second act. Instantly, he snatches it up, rescuing the book from the coals to devour the rest. This is his mental undoing.

    ‘ . . . I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with horror which at all times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where the black stars hang in the heavens, where the shadows of men’s thought lengthen in the afternoon when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask.’

    Chambers took these and other mythical place names from three well-known horror stories by the American genre writer, Ambrose Bierce: ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’, ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’ and ‘Haita the Shepherd’. Chambers was obviously familiar with Bierce’s work, and we can note similarities between this author’s tangential style – a style that hints and suggests rather than states, making the reader come to his own conclusions – and that used by Chambers in the tales in The King in Yellow.

    Chambers was also influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, particularly those stories where Poe’s richness of language and decadence of thought are given full rein, such as ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. In many ways, the book The King in Yellow carries such threat and power as the death-bringing creature in Poe’s tale. In what, for me, is perhaps the best story in this volume, ‘The Mask’, there are particular colourings and touches of Poe in the writing and structure. While there is no doubt that the story is unique, there are fragments of ideas from Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, along with elements of the Pygmalion legend and a touch of science fiction also. It makes for a fascinating read and the twist at the end is deliciously satisfying.

    H. P. Lovecraft’s favourite story in this collection was ‘The Yellow Sign’. He called it, ‘altogether one of the great weird tales ever written.’ In this narrative Chambers draws on his own background and experiences to present us with a tortured artist who is troubled by strange dreams, dreams that start to become a reality after he encounters The King in Yellow: ‘I had long decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it . . . ’ But, like a drug addiction, the temptation becomes too great and he succumbs. The influence of the malevolent tome is instantaneous. Like the picture of Dorian Gray that harbours all the sin and corruption of his immoral life, this play was filled with ideas and words which ‘sparkled like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis!’

    The artist learns as others have that once the book is opened, ‘I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.’

    This fatal and damaging book also appears in ‘In The Court of the Dragon’ where it causes the narrator to experience unsettling prophetic dreams.

    The remaining stories make no mention of ‘The King in Yellow’ but are a wonderful mix of the strange and unsettling. ‘The Demoiselle d’Ys’ is the last supernatural tale in the collection and is rich in atmosphere and romance. It is a fine example of how Chambers was able to conjure up mood and suspense with atmospheric and mystical description, and while one might deduce the dénouement it still arrives with a pleasing shiver.

    The strangest tale in this collection is ‘The Prophet’s Paradise’, which is a series of short scenes of a rich but esoteric and indeed hallucinatory nature. The luxurious repetitive prose appears to contain some contradictory universal truths. One must admit that while the piece is rich in imagination, it remains open to personal interpretation.

    ‘The Street of The Four Winds’ is another Poe-flavoured story dealing with a mysterious cat and a lost love from the past. Again Chambers leads the reader gently into the story and then forces him to sketch in the background of this bizarre little conundrum.

    As we move further into the book and the section that features the stories set in France, the supernatural elements fade away. However, we still have the themes of the danger of too much knowledge, and of innocence threatened and protected. The stories are loosely connected but not presented in any sort of chronological order. ‘The Street of the First Shell’ is an impressionistic account of the siege of Paris in 1870. One wonders whether Chambers had a reason for arranging the book in this way. After all the first story in the collection looked forward to a futuristic New York and now here we are dealing with historical reality, albeit presented in a fairly surreal fashion. Perhaps in these inconsequential time-shifts Chambers wanted to show how evil ripples out from a centre, never entirely vanishing, but at times diminishing and being conquered by love. As the critic William McClain observed: ‘As dark as [Chambers’s] vision may be, hope and love are never absent.’

    ‘The Street of the First Shell’ demonstrates very clearly that Chambers is not an easy writer to read. He feeds his readers with information slowly and it is their task to build up the overall picture. It is a challenging and diffuse narrative and if we do not pay attention we lose the richness and the subtlety of the writing.

    In several of the stories thus far love has played an important role in the plot. The final two tales in this collection take this element as its pivotal theme. Indeed there is a similarity in plot and purpose in both ‘The Street of Our Lady of the Fields’ and ‘Rue Barrée’, a similarity which is emphasised by the use of the character Foxhall Clifford who appears in both stories performing virtually the same function. He is an art student who acts as a catalyst bringing the two lovers together in both narratives. It has been suggested by some critics that ‘Rue Barrée’ was written quickly to bulk up the collection and that explains its weakness and its similarity to the previous tale. Certainly while ‘The Street of Our Lady in the Fields’ is a charming and touching love story, ‘Rue Barrée’ is the least effective of the tales in the collection and the ending is both disappointing and dissatisfyingly ambiguous.

    Chambers never achieved such high critical acclaim with his other writings as he did with The King in Yellow. Although he went on to write other books in the genre, such as The Maker of Moons (1896), In Search of the Unknown (1904) and The Tree of Heaven (1907), he became better known for his popular romances, both contemporary and historical, which he appeared to turn out in great numbers with ease. Such an output provided him with a healthy income, enabling him to live in his opulently furnished mansion in upstate New York. This concentration on romantic literature earned him the scorn of many critics. Lovecraft who had been such a champion of The King in Yellow called him a ‘fallen Titan – equipped with the right brains and education, but wholly out of the habit of using them’.

    It may have been that Chambers realised he could never replicate the unique qualities in The King in Yellow and so resignedly took the easier option. Whatever we feel about the bulk of his output, Chambers’s remarkable book which you hold in your hands remains as powerful as it did when first published, a work that caused the scornful Lovecraft to observe: ‘[It] achieves notable heights of cosmic fear.’

    DAVID STUART DAVIES

    THE KING IN YELLOW

    The King in Yellow

    is dedicated to my brother

    Along the shore the cloud waves break,

    The twin suns sink beneath the lake,

    The shadows lengthen

    In Carcosa.

    Strange is the night where black stars rise

    And strange moons circle through the skie

    But stranger still is

    Lost Carcosa.

    Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

    Where flap the tatters of the King,

    Must die unheard in

    Dim Carcosa.

    Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

    Die thou unsung, as tears unshed

    Shall dry and die in

    Lost Carcosa.

    Cassilda’s Song in The King in Yellow,

    Act i, Scene 2

    The Repairer of Reputations

    1

    Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre . . . Voilà toute la différence.

    Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labour questions were settled. The war with Germany, incident on that country’s seizure of the Samoan Islands, had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over repeated naval victories, and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General Von Gartenlaube’s forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and Hawaian investments had paid one hundred per cent and the territory of Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a superb state of defence. Every coast city had been well supplied with land fortifications; the army under the parental eye of the General Staff, organised according to the Prussian system, had been increased to 300,000 men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was as necessary as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was prosperous; Chicago, for a moment paralysed after a second great fire, had risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a godsend to the population. The subsidising of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The Secretary of Forestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalisation, and the gradual centralisation of power in the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the Government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organisations tacked on to the tail of skeletonised regiments by a former Secretary of War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world which after all is a world by itself.

    But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the throes of Anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and bound them one by one.

    In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalised by the dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live in the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge Statue was removed in that year. In the following winter began that agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.

    I had walked down that day from Dr Archer’s house on Madison Avenue, where I had been as a mere formality. Ever since that fall from my horse, four years before, I had been troubled at times with pains in the back of my head and neck, but now for months they had been absent, and the doctor sent me away that day saying there was nothing more to be cured in me. It was hardly worth his fee to be told that; I knew it myself. Still I did not grudge him the money. What I minded was the mistake which he made at first. When they picked me up from the pavement where I lay unconscious, and somebody had mercifully sent a bullet through my horse’s head, I was carried to Dr Archer, and he, pronouncing my brain affected, placed me in his private asylum where I was obliged to endure treatment for insanity. At last he decided that I was well, and I, knowing that my mind had always been as sound as his, if not sounder, ‘paid my tuition’ as he jokingly called it, and left. I told him, smiling, that I would get even with him for his mistake, and he laughed heartily, and asked me to call once in a while. I did so, hoping for a chance to even up accounts, but he gave me none, and I told him I would wait.

    The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and above all – oh, above all else – ambitious. There was only one thing which troubled me; I laughed at my own uneasiness, and yet it troubled me.

    During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, The King in Yellow. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth – a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious

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