The King in Yellow
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- Publication Date: 1895
- Written by: Robert W. Chambers
- Page count: 154
When I was in college, as I was diving into the works of H. P. Lovecraft and other weird fiction authors, one book kept getting mentioned in lists of the best works of the genre: The King in Yellow. At the time, I only had a vague idea of what it was. The most significant thing that I knew about it was that the later Cthulhu Mythos entity Hastur originated from it. I had a friend at the time who was also a fan of the Mythos, and Hastur was his favorite of the various entities in the universe. He would always tell me about how good the book was, and even offered to let me borrow his copy at one point so I could give it a try. I ended up buying a cheap copy for myself, and it sat on my shelf for over five years before I finally got around to fully reading it after a few aborted attempts. After many years of hype and curiosity, having now finished it, is it bad to say that I find myself a little bit underwhelmed?
My copy of the book is significantly shorter than its original form. The full version contained 10 short stories, the first four of which are connected by a play of the same name that drives its readers insane by the second act. My copy only contains these four stories, since the rest of them are apparently unconnected romantic tales. There are several aspects of these stories that would later become mainstays in the Cthulhu Mythos and other weird tales of the time. The most obvious aspect is a writing that contains forbidden knowledge that damages the mind of the reader, an idea later repeated with the Necronomicon and other fictional books. Another is an unreliable narrator and a slow descent into insanity, which is best shown off in the first story of the book, The Repairer of Reputations.
The protagonist of Repairer appears perfectly normal at first, but it's soon revealed that he spent time in an insane asylum, where he read the King in Yellow play. After this, there are several great moments where you begin to question if what he is telling you is true at all. At one point, when referring to a character who is thought of as insane by many, he remarks "Many called him insane, but I knew him to be as sane as I was", which is such a cheeky line. Another part that I enjoyed involved the protagonist dressing himself in a crown of gold and diamonds that he keeps in a safe, preparing himself for when the ominous King comes to lay his claim on Earth. When his cousin finds him doing this, he remarks that the crown is simply made of cheap brass, and it's kept in an old biscuit box. That's only scratching the surface, and while the story ends pretty abruptly (there are several points of world-building that I wish were explained more), I can easily see why this type of story and protagonist would be influential to many. For the time it was written, it feels incredibly unique.
The final story is probably the second best of the bunch. Most of it revolves around a painter and his model discussing their sightings of a mysterious, corpse-looking man near a graveyard. In the last chapter, both characters end up reading The King in Yellow, and their states of mind are permanently changed. The short remainder of the story is the narrator's increasingly mad ramblings as he fears some unknown force coming to get him. I love this part because it feels like a precursor to one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, Dagon. Both characters are horrified of their impending deaths by something unknown, be it physical or supernatural. I'm also a sucker for the types of stories where a character is narrating their own demise and the sentence stops in the middle of a thought. This is the closest that the book came to feeling like the Mythos-type stories that I enjoy so much, and while it was good on its own, this is where my problems with the book begin.
The middle two stories of this book feel completely ancillary compared to the beginning and end. While the third story shares a similar theme of a protagonist losing his mind, the second story is a complete waste of time. Most of it revolves around a group of people working on a house full of sculptures, and one guy has figured out how to make a solution that turns living things into stone. The implications here are obvious, but my biggest problem with this story is that it feels completely irrelevant to both the book and the fictional world it takes place in. The titular play is only offhandedly mentioned one or two times, and it never actually plays a part in the story itself. You could make a stretch and say that the guy who made the stone solution got the mixture / idea from it, but this is never explicitly stated. It feels like a completely unconnected story that the author shoehorned a mention of the play into, and tossed it in the book for padding.
My biggest disappointment has to be just how little the play of The King in Yellow is featured in this book, let alone anything explicitly supernatural. Going in, I was expecting a much deeper dive into this cursed writing and its effects on the world, or even what supernatural entity would be pulling the strings behind the scenes. After all, didn't Hastur the Unspeakable originate from here? Instead, what I got were three stories of insane people, one of a sculptor wasting time, and a book that may or may not be supernatural in nature. I discussed this book with my girlfriend a couple of times and read a little bit of the history of this book's influence, and I think I figured out where my disconnect lies. The original premise of The King in Yellow was a sort of mind virus that spreads as people read the work. No supernatural entity is ever explicitly stated to exist, and the words of the play itself cause insanity in people. When the work was later incorporated into the Cthulhu Mythos by August Derleth, it was reimagined to where the play is a work used by a supernatural god named Hastur to spread his influence, using the King in Yellow as an avatar. I went in expecting this later interpretation, and was caught off guard when the book didn't deliver on that premise. I do find the original intention of the work to be much more interesting than what it was later turned into because of August Derleth's fanfiction, and it's kind of a shame that his reimagining has overshadowed the original work in some areas of the fandom.
So, is The King in Yellow a bad book? I don't think so. It has nuggets of brilliance that were strong enough to influence generations of writers, and is an interesting prototype of the themes that would be expanded upon by Lovecraft and his colleagues. However, these bits are sort of overshadowed by inconsistent storytelling, not enough usage of the titular cursed play, and a modern-day reinterpretation that completely misrepresents what the original work is. I walked away from it a little disappointed, but it may hold up a bit better if I give it another read sometime.