The King in Yellow is a collection of nine short stories and several poems written by William W. Chambers in 1895. It was highly regarded by H. P. Lovecraft and is something of a cult classic in the horror genre. The common thread among the first four stories is an imaginary and malevolent play called The King in Yellow, which drives anyone who reads it insane. Chambers only provides scattered clues about the play’s contents.
The edition I read, published by Pushkin Press, only contains the first four stories, which are the only ones that fall within the horror genre. The stories are:
- The Repairer of Reputations. A man in a fictional future New York City (the 1920s) drifts between reality and fantasy, causing himself and others a world of hurt.
- The Mask. A sculptor discovers a remarkable technique to speed up his work, but there’s a downside.
- In the Court of the Dragon. A troubled man is stalked in Paris by a sinister man whose intentions are unclear.
- The Yellow Sign. An amoral painter loses his last vestige of honor, but it gets worse.
All four of the stories have excellent plots and a suitably weird and foreboding atmosphere. The Repairer of Reputations is the strongest story by far, having the most fleshed-out characters, plot complexities, and altogether bizarre feel. Lovecraft admired Chambers’s technique of implying rather than describing gore. Chambers admired Lovecraft as well, as evidenced by his using names from Lovecraft stories for characters and locales in his imaginary play, The King in Yellow.
Chambers was extremely popular in his day, writing macabre fiction and other works of fiction and non-fiction. He is largely forgotten today, but these stories deserve to be read — they are quite chilling.
Further Reading
The King of Creepy – About H. P. Lovecraft
