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The King in Yellow

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The King in Yellow is a 1895 collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers. The book could be categorized as early horror fiction, but it also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction.

Contents

Stories

The stories are loosely connected by three main devices:

Yellow signifies the decadent and aesthetic attitudes that were fashionable at the turn of the 19th century, typified by such publications as The Yellow BookPrice, "The Mythology of Hastur", The Hastur Cycle, p. iii., 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 and disease.

The stories are macabre in tone and are frequently set in Paris, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents. Those who read the play The King in Yellow go mad or meet horrible ends. As if to protect his readers, Chambers quotes only brief passages from the play, as in the extract from "Cassilda's Song... Act I, Scene 2" that introduces the first story in the collection:

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
:In Carcosa.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
:Lost Carcosa.
Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
:Dim Carcosa.
Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
:Lost Carcosa.
Such quotes come only from the first act, allowing Chambers to hint that the second act is far more disturbing: "The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect."

Chambers usually gives only scattered hints of the contents of the play, as in this extract from "The Repairer of Reputations":

He mentioned the establishment of the Dynasty in Carcosa, the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of the Hyades. He spoke of Cassilda and Camilla, and sounded the cloudy depths of Demhe, and the lake of Hali. "The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever," he muttered, but I do not believe Vance heard him. Then by degrees he led Vance along the ramifications of the Imperial family, from Naotalba and Phantom of Truth, to Aldones, and then tossing aside his manuscript and notes, he began the wonderful story of the Last King.

A similar passage occurs in "The Yellow Sign", in which two protagonists have read The King in Yellow:

Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.

Some stories in the book do not follow the macabre theme of the others, and are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers' later work.

Cthulhu Mythos

Lovecraft read The King in Yellow in early 1927Joshi & Schultz, "Chambers, Robert William", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 38. and was so enchanted by it that he included references to various things and places from the book — such as the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign — in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931)Pearsall, "Yellow Sign", The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 436., one of his seminal Cthulhu Mythos stories. In the story, Lovecraft linked the Yellow Sign to Hastur, but in this passage it is not clear as to what Lovecraft meant Hastur to be. August Derleth developed Hastur into a Great Old One in his controversial reworking of Lovecraft's universe, elaborating on this connection in his own mythos stories.

In the writings of Derleth and a few other latter-day Cthulhu Mythos authors, the King in Yellow is an avatar of Hastur, so named because of his appearance as a thin, floating man covered in tattered yellow robes. Lovecraft also borrowed Chambers' method of only vaguely referring to supernatural events, entities, and places, thereby allowing his readers to imagine the horror for themselves.

Other appearances

References

Notes

External links

 

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