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    The King in Yellow
    The King in Yellow
    The King in Yellow
    Ebook237 pages4 hours

    The King in Yellow

    By Robert W. Chambers and H. P. Lovecraft

    3.5/5

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    THE KING IN YELLOW -- recently featured in HBO's hit series TRUE DETECTIVE -- is a collection of 10 short stories, the reading of which will curse one to a terrible fate. You have been warned! This edition features an introduction by H.P. Lovecraft.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWildside Press
    Release dateFeb 27, 2014
    ISBN9781479409334
    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

    18 ratings21 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.
    • 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.

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    The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers

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