The King in Yellow

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The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories published by Robert W. Chambers in 1895. The stories could be categorized as early horror fiction, but the work also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, science fiction and romance. The first four stories in the collection involve a fictional two-act play of the same title.

Contents

[edit] Stories

The first four stories are loosely connected by three main devices:

  • A play in book form entitled The King in Yellow
  • A mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity known as The King in Yellow
  • An eerie symbol called The Yellow Sign

Yellow signifies the decadent and aesthetic attitudes that were fashionable at the turn of the 19th century, typified by such publications as The Yellow Book[1], 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, disease, and specifically mental illness. For instance, the famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", involving a bedridden woman's descent into madness, was published shortly before Chambers' book.

These stories are macabre in tone, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents. Those who read the play The King in Yellow go mad and/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.

The first story "The Repairer of Reputations", is set in an imagined future 1920s America, whose history, being at odds with the knowledge of the reader, adds to the effect of its unreliable narrator. The next three are set in Paris at the same time.

The other stories in the book do not follow the macabre theme of the first four, and most are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers' later work. Some are linked to the preceding stories by their Parisien setting and artistic protagonists.

[edit] List of Stories

The stories present in the book are:

  • The Repairer of Reputations
  • The Mask (short story)
  • In the Court of the Dragon
  • The Yellow Sign
  • The Demoiselle d'Ys
  • The Prophets' Paradise
  • The Street of the Four Winds
  • The Street of the First Shell
  • The Street of Our Lady of the Fields
  • Rue Barrée

[edit] Cthulhu Mythos

Lovecraft read The King in Yellow in early 1927[2] 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),[3] one of his seminal Cthulhu Mythos stories. Lovecraft borrowed Chambers' method of only vaguely referring to supernatural events, entities, and places, thereby allowing his readers to imagine the horror for themselves.

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.

[edit] Other appearances

  • Some writers have attempted to write a full text for the supposedly fictional The King in Yellow, including James Blish ("More Light" [1970]), Lin Carter ("Tatters of the King" [written 1986]), and Thom Ryng.[4][5]
  • 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.
  • "The King in Yellow" is the name of a 1945 short story by Raymond Chandler. It is a crime story, in which the narrator has apparently read Chambers' book, and uses the phrase to describe one of the other characters.
  • In 2001, director Aaron Vanek and writer John Tynes adapted much of the book's content into a film titled The Yellow Sign.[1]
  • Brian Keene's short story "The King", in: Yellow, recounts the story of a modern-day couple who attend a performance of the play. It was first published in Fear of Gravity, and was reprinted in A Walk on the Darkside and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16.

[edit] References

  • Pearsall, Anthony B. (2005). The Lovecraft Lexicon, 1st edition, Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Pub. ISBN 1-561-84129-3.
  • Price, Robert M. (ed.) (October 1993). The Hastur Cycle, 1st edition, Oakland, CA: Chaosium. ISBN 0-568-82009-7.
  • Ryng, Thom (April 2006). The King in Yellow, 2nd edition, Seattle, WA: Armitage House. ISBN 1-4116-8576-8.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Price, "The Mythology of Hastur", The Hastur Cycle, p. iii.
  2. ^ Joshi & Schultz, “Chambers, Robert William”, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 38.
  3. ^ Pearsall, “Yellow Sign”, The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 436.
  4. ^ Cf. The Hastur Cycle.
  5. ^ Cf. The King in Yellow (Ryng).

[edit] External links

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