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 fantasy, mystery, mythology, and science fiction.

1 Stories
2 The Cthulhu Mythos
3 Other fiction
4 References
- 4.1 Notes
5 External links

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Stories

The stories are loosely connected by three main devices:

A fictional play in book-form entitled The King in Yellow
A mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity of the same name
An eerie emblem or symbol called The Yellow Sign

Yellow signified decadence and aestheticism at the turn of the 19th century, as in The Yellow Book<ref>Price, "The Mythology of Hastur", The Hastur Cycle, pp. iii.</ref>, a literary journal associated with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. It has also been suggested that the color yellow represents quarantine, and thus decay and disease.

Chambers' stories are macabre in tone. The most frequent setting is Paris, and the central characters are often artists or decadents. Those characters who read the play The King in Yellow go mad or meet horrible dooms. As if to protect his own readers, Chambers quotes only brief passages of the play, like 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 only come 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."

Otherwise, Chambers 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", after the two protagonists 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.

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The Cthulhu Mythos

Lovecraft read Chambers' book in early 1927<ref>Joshi & Schultz, "Chambers, Robert William", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, pp. 38.</ref> and was so enchanted by it that he included references to the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign in his short story "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931)<ref>Pearsall, "Yellow Sign", The Lovecraft Lexicon, pp. 436.</ref>, one of his seminal Cthulhu Mythos stories. In that story, Lovecraft linked the Yellow Sign to Hastur, a fictional deity invented by Ambrose Bierce, a connection elaborated on by August Derleth in his own mythos stories. In later mythos materials, the King in Yellow is an avatar of Hastur, so named from 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 the reader to imagine the horror for themselves.

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Other fiction

Some writers have attempted to write a full text for the fictional The King in Yellow, including James Blish ("More Light" [1970]) and Lin Carter ("Tatters of the King" [written 1986]).<ref>Cf. The Hastur Cycle</ref>

Karl Edward Wagner used it as a motif in his novella The River of Night's Dreaming.

Lawrence Watt-Evans adopted the name for a villainously amoral character in a series of novels: The Lure of the Basilisk, The Seven Altars of Dusarra, The Sword of Bheleu, and The Book of Silence, collectively known as The Lords of Dus.