A Strange Coincidence, Three Years Before "The King in Yellow..."

Thanks to the YouTube channel Liminal Spaces for finding this incredible book! His video "Insane Mind-Bending Weird Fiction that Came Out 3 Years Before The King in Yellow" pointed me in the direction of this collection of short stories by Marcel Schwob.

Interestingly, the English translation, by Iain White from 1982, collects stories from four of Schwob's books, but omits many of them! In this post, I'm only considering stories from Schwob's Double Hearts and The King in the Golden Mask, and White actually translated less than half of them!

But what he did translate is really good. Schwob has a really good sense for detailed descriptions while maintaining a great economy of words. He also writes with more focus than we found in The King in Yellow. Schwob's stories are consistently creepy and dark, dealing with Death and what surrounds Death.

Almost all of these stories are less than five (dense) pages, and they're so strange. It's hard to put into words. Most stories try to have an arc. Schwob's often seem to be cut out of a small portion of the arc, leading to an ending which satisfies without trying to. It's really quite amazing. The stories often lack any sense of moral or message, simply relating a short series of events vividly and un-judgmentally. Especially the stories from Double Hearts. I think that first book is actually better than The King in the Golden Mask, based on White's selection.

We get weird, hallucinatory narratives and lots of mysticism and magic.

Schwob's writing is extremely well-balanced, keeping paragraphs at reasonable size, neither trying to cheaply catch your attention with short ones, or impress you with long ones.

The English translation is not in the public domain, but you can read it here.

French versions of Double Hearts and The King in the Golden Mask are available for free.

For more details, see the embedded video and go watch Liminal Spaces's video, too!

Chapters in my video:

0:00 Introduction

15:55 The Strigae

17:33 Train 081

19:03 Arachne

20:01 The Veiled Man

21:10 A Skeleton

22:15 The Fat Man

23:07 The Dom

24:29 The Amber-trader

25:35 Merigot Marches

27:10 The ‘Papier Rouge’

28:34 The Firebrands

29:33 The King in the Golden Mask

31:25 The Death of Odjigh

32:22 The Embalming Women

33:53 The Plague

34:40 The Milesian Virgins

35:24 The Sabbat at Mofflaines

36:15 Blanche the Bloody

37:38 The Flute

39:59 The Sleeping City

41:14 Conclusion