The King In Yellow

October 31, 2024 8:04 AM

Chambers' influential, haunting stories of the play that seems to break down reality for those who read it.

The collection includes four supernatural stories about the King in Yellow, another pair of tales that could be called weird fiction, and then a set of stories about bohemian artists in Paris.

The stories have taken on a life of their own and been absorbed into the broader Lovecraftian mythos, as well as famously appearing in True Detective.

Available for free on Project Gutenberg or as ebook in various inexpensive editions. The book link on this post goes to recently reprinted version by Arcdream Publishing with annotations by Kenneth Hite.

posted by mark k (10 comments total)

One of my Halloween reads. I had not done this before, although I had a vague idea of the mind-warping play.

For my tastes there are two brilliant stories in this, The Yellow Sign and The Repairer of Reputations. I also quite liked The Demoiselle D'Ys ghost story. The rest wouldn't have really stood out to me in any random anthology. Percentage-wise, this should be disappointing but the good stories are so good I have no regrets reading the whole thing. (To a non-completist, I'd probably just recommend the first five stories, though the first of the Paris stories also worked for me.)

The Repairer of Reputations marvelously weird, set in an alternate future timeline, in a dystopia that has suicide machines. The main character is a like Emperor Norton would be, if Norton wanted to use his imaginary power to oppress his subject. Or perhaps he really is that close to becoming king?
posted by mark k at 8:20 AM on October 31 [5 favorites]

The Repairer of Reputations is utterly brilliant. I wonder sometimes about why Chambers set the story in his future; to make the impossible seem possible? The militarism evident in the story and the euthanasia "clinic" squatting like a skull across the road from the Repairer... these elements have a small impact on the plot, but a huge impact on the mood. Then you reflect on the story's publication in 1895, long before the "weird fiction" wave of HPL and his contemporaries. It's unfortunate that, in his lifetime, Chambers attained his greatest success as a writer of light romance novels. (He made an attempt to combine weird with romance in tales like The Harbor Master. The results were... not great.)
posted by SPrintF at 9:07 AM on October 31 [3 favorites]

No mask? No mask!
posted by kyrademon at 10:33 AM on October 31 [4 favorites]

The source of one of my favorite very short stories, the hypnotic (and timely) "The Throng":

There, where the throng was thickest in the street, I stood with Pierrot. All eyes were turned on me.

“What are they laughing at?” I asked, but he grinned, dusting the chalk from my black cloak. “I cannot see; it must be something droll, perhaps an honest thief!”

All eyes were turned on me.

“He has robbed you of your purse!” they laughed.

“My purse!” I cried; “Pierrot—help! it is a thief!”

They laughed: “He has robbed you of your purse!”

Then Truth stepped out holding a mirror. “If he is an honest thief,” cried Truth, “Pierrot shall find him with this mirror!” but he only grinned dusting the chalk from my black cloak.

“You see,” he said, “Truth is an honest thief, she brings you back your mirror.”

All eyes were turned on me.

“Arrest Truth!” I cried, forgetting it was not a mirror but a purse I lost, standing with Pierrot, there, where the throng was thickest in the street.

posted by Rhaomi at 11:31 AM on October 31 [1 favorite]

the TTRPG game Delta Green has a superb campaign Impossible Landscapes that gets the king in yellow on a very deep level and is immensely fun to read, if a little daunting to run.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:52 PM on October 31 [3 favorites]

https://breezewiki.com/glasscannonnetwork/wiki/Get_In_The_Trunk:_Season_4 is the first of three seasons that run through it.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:53 PM on October 31

In the short story "More Light", James Blish tries his hand, in-story, at writing The Play (1st and 2nd acts).

Some discussion about this at LibraryThing and Ligotti.net.
posted by kurumi at 10:26 AM on November 1 [2 favorites]

Repairer of Reputations is such an incredibly evocative story it is easy to see how it could have captured the imagination of those that read it on its debut (and people now). I came to the book via Lovecraft so I was a bit confused by the later "Bohemians in Paris" stories, waiting for some kind of weird to emerge but no such luck. Even for that type of fiction they are pretty underwhelming. But the greatness of Repairer helps bridge that a bit. Around the time I read it I stumbled upon Jeff Vandermeer's comment on the King In Yellow from an old Buzzfeed interview kind of funny (though to be fair he mostly is talking about that first season of True Detective):

"I'm somewhat indifferent to The King in Yellow; I don't mind it."

Though there are loads of short films referencing the the King in Yellow and of course True Detective but there's no movies that have mined that book (at least not overtly) which I find a bit surprising (there is an upcoming film I guess).
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:24 AM on November 1

There’s a public domain audiobook version at PG, too - many file formats though the downloading is a bit annoying.
posted by clew at 3:45 PM on November 2

For the audiobooks, the version read by Peter Yearsley are fantastic. Rather than leaning into horror, he brings out regret and grief in a way that I find super compelling.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:55 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]