The King in Yellow

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.

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 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 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

Some writers have attempted to write a full text for the fictional The King in Yellow, including James Blish ("More Light" href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/1970 in literature">1970), Lin Carter ("Tatters of the King" 1986), and Thom Ryng.Cf. The Hastur Cycle.Cf. The King in Yellow (Ryng).

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.

"The King in Yellow" is the name of a 1945 short story by Raymond Chandler.

In Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast, Zeb Carter mentions the King in Yellow's "world" as one to be avoided.

In 2001, director Aaron Vanek and writer John Tynes adapted much of the book's content into a film titled The Yellow Sign.^*

References

Notes