If you read Lovecraft you've probably heard of The King in Yellow. Lovecraft found the book interesting and wove references to some of its elements into many of his stories. Yet at the same time, Lovecraft said it had "uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere" in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."
Still, I was not fully aware of the uneven interest when I sat down to read the book.
Robert W. Chambers was mostly a writer of historical fiction, influenced by Ambrose Bierce. He published The King in Yellow in 1895. And the title of the book is actually the title of a play in the world of the book that makes people go insane if they read the second act.
Overall, the book has brilliantly descriptive prose, surprisingly modern dialogue, expressive but unmemorable characters, and simple but compelling plots.
It's also not a cosmic horror book in toto; most of the stories actually are not horror stories at all, so I was very surprised by the influence this book has had.
The first story, "The Repairer of Reputations" leans heaviest on the fictional play. The main character is a person who was committed to an asylum for some time, and there he read the play. The story takes place in a somewhat dystopian 1920s New York City, in a world where a great war has just required many great cities to be rebuilt. The architecture is beautiful, but the spirits of the people are... wrong. A "suicide chamber" is built for public use.
The story proceeds with our main character meeting with the mysterious and grotesque Repairer of Reputations, and we watch as our narrator becomes more and more reliable as the story goes on. He has delusions of grandeur which mixes well with the strange mix of plausible and implausible characters he meets. The question remains throughout the story: Is Wilde, the Repairer, feeding the main character's delusions or is he partly or wholly a hallucination?
It's a fun story, and quite creepy and weird.
The second story is called "The Mask," and while it refers to the eponymous play, it's actually a story mixing romance and alchemy. A compound which turns living things into marble is discovered, and tragedy occurs, with a hint of possible redemption right at the end. It's actually a very good story.
"In the Court of the Dragon" is next, and has the main character reading the play. He is sitting in church one day and notices the organist looking hatefully at him. What happens next is a combination of fear and horror that might have been the result of reading a little bit of the play. Without spoiling anything, the story uses music and atmosphere well, with a blaring organ that seemingly makes the whole world fall away.
"The Yellow Sign" is next, and is about a very strange church watchman. Chambers carefully and expertly ratchets up the tension and weirdness, and plays with the blurred line between dreams and the truth. There is a sympathetic romantic subplot which works fairly well.
Next up is "The Demoiselle d'Ys," and it's here that the tone of the book changes from horror to romance and historicism. An American out hunting in France is lost in a swamp, and is saved by a mysterious falconer woman claiming to be the mistress of the Chateau d'Ys. Ys is a mythical city of France that was swallowed by the sea (like Atlantis), and is a common element in stories, symbolizing lost love. It's also the same legend that led to the Ys series of video games by Falcom.
The lost love theme plays out in this story, and is actually the main plot. It was here that I started to wonder what this book was. The King in Yellow is totally absent.
The next "story" is called "The Prophets' Paradise" and is actually a collection of very short bits of cryptic fiction. It's dark and unknown, but not really horrifying and not really related to the maddening play.
Seventh is "The Street of the Four Winds." A man takes in a stray cat and tracks down its previous owner. He's a slightly strange man who talks to animals. It's plain historical fiction, though weird and whimsical, and it's not really even dark anymore, though the ending is a bit macabre.
Next is "The Street of the First Shell," which is straight plain historical fiction, about the siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871. The main character is an American artist living in Paris, and the story is mostly about the destitution of war. It has lies, spies, and personal conflicts, and portrays effectively the feeling of being besieged. It ends romantically, with a little twist about who your real family is.
Ninth is "The Street of Our Lady of the Fields," which is a very practical little story about an artist in Paris.
Finally, we have "Rue Barreé," which is another story about an artist in Paris, but this one is more metaphorical than the previous.
By the end of the book, I was feeling a little crazy myself, because by that point, all traces of The King in Yellow were completely gone. I had expected a creeping horror, and instead I got a horror that creeped out of the book by the end.
Of course, my expectations aside, The King in Yellow is well-written and a good read. But I had only read wikipedia-style bits about how Lovecraft was influenced by the book, and not his lethargic praise from his famous essay. That's why I was so surprised to see The King in Yellow creep away from horror, and not toward it.
Read a copy free here:
https://archive.org/details/kinginyellow0000robe_d8v3/page/n5/mode/2up
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