This edition of Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow collects four of the original ten stories, omitting those standalone tales that don’t have anything to do with the King in Yellow “storyline” (for want of a better word). So the four left - The Repairer of Reputations, The Mask, In the Court of the Dragon, The Yellow Sign - form a kind of linked narrative here.
I’ve known about this book for a while as I’ve read HP Lovecraft before and know he was a big fan of this book and it was referenced throughout the excellent first season of True Detective. I read the INJ Culbard comics adaptation of this book a few years ago though and didn’t think much of it, so I wasn’t expecting much from this one - and, yup, it’s not that good!
The Repairer of Reputations is definitely the standout of the four as parts of it are interesting once you realise the narrator is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, while the other three stories are just plain crap through and through. Told from the perspective of a mental patient called Castaigne, he visits a strange fellow called Mr Wilde who somehow “repairs” people’s damaged reputations. Both are completely mad and are obsessed with a cursed play called The King in Yellow - things don’t end well for either!
A sculptor mentioned in the first story is one of the main characters of the second story, The Mask. Boris Yvain, a Parisian sculptor, has discovered a new method of creating sculptures: dipping the live object into a special liquid thus turning them into a piece of living/dead art! But when the play, The King in Yellow, appears in their lives, things take a turn for the worse…
In the Court of the Dragon is about a man who has been reading the cursed play and believes a church organist is after his soul - or is it the King himself?
The Yellow Sign is about a painter and his model who get creeped out by a weird dude who stalks them, muttering about the yellow sign, and then they have strange dreams. The painter also happens to have The King in Yellow on his bookshelf.
Chambers’ writing style is overly descriptive and plodding, providing a lot of extraneous detail and little in the way of story. What would’ve been far more satisfying is if he’d explained a bit more of what this King in Yellow stuff is!! What is the play about? What makes it cursed and/or so terrible? What is the significance of these words that repeatedly crop up: Carcosa, Hastur, Aldebaran, Hyades??
We’re given little details here and there - the unnamed author supposedly shot himself after writing it, though others believe he’s still alive - but it’s not enough. I get that leaving it up to the reader’s imagination is artistic, but it can also be lazy and unimaginative on the part of the writer, which is the case here. It’s underwritten and unimpressive.
We should know who wrote the play and something of its contents at the very least. Leaving it as vague as this doesn’t make it more scary, it only makes it inscrutable. Even though the stories are tenuously linked, the connections are pointless, add nothing to one another or to a better understanding of what this King in Yellow thing is.
Which is only more frustrating because it all sounds tantalisingly good. A cursed play that drives people mad, a demonic King in Yellow with cultish followers on Earth, undead, magic, soul-taking - good, no? If only Chambers had had the wherewithal to develop it.
The world he set it in is another curious detail. The book was published in 1895 but it’s set in 1920 so it’s sci-fi-ish, and, oddly it’s a world where actual suicide booths, called “lethal chambers”, have been built and sanctioned by the government! What a bonkers detail to highlight. I guess it adds to the unreality of the piece.
I can see why Lovecraft liked Chambers so much though. They both wrote very flowery prose about vague menacing things, often in an unentertaining and boring way, they both write about a mad author creating a cursed literary work (Lovecraft’s is Alhazred’s Necronomicon), and The Yellow Sign even ends in the classic Lovecraftian mid-sentence way of his st…
If you’re curious enough to read Chambers’ King in Yellow, this is probably the best edition as it cuts the chaff and only leaves you with the linked chaff (because I’m certain none of it is good). Parts of the first story are mildly interesting and the details that crop up throughout offer up an idea of something potentially great that Chambers never realised but at least inspired others to create better works later on down the line, like Lovecraft, etc. Overall though it ain’t much and I wouldn’t have high hopes if you’re going to check out this rather feeble horror-adjacent effort.
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