The King in Yellow
In 1895, Robert W Chambers published a collection of short stories titled The King in Yellow, which is the name of a play that appears in the first 4 stories:
- The Repairer of Reputations
- The Mask
- In the Court of the Dragon
- The Yellow Sign
We first read these stories years ago. We had heard about them and wanted to know what they were like. For us, these were just more spooky stories. The King in Yellow was no different than Lovecraft’s cursed tomes and alien gods - unexplained and inexplicable. It was a conversation on Twitter with @avatar_chaos, who knows way more about Cosmic Horror than we ever will, that pushed us to look deeper into the meaning of the play and its effects on its unfortunate readers.
All 4 stories take place in the same alternate timeline and some of the characters are mentioned in more than one story, but the most important thing they have in common is someone who was foolish enough to read The King in Yellow. But why is that such a bad thing? After all, reading is a worthy occupation and you can learn so many things from books. Well, turns out this play is no ordinary literary work.
The book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.
So, avoid it… if you can! Oh, and beware the SPOILERS.
THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS
Hildred Castaigne is conspiring with his friend Mr Wilde to steal the crown from his cousin Louis so he can become King of America as a vassal of the King in Yellow… or is he?
I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth - a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.
This is a great introduction to Chambers’s creation. We like the idea of the play spreading like a virus, infecting everyone everywhere with its particular brand of madness, impossible to eradicate. Chambers opted not to give too many details about the contents of the play, the King, or Carcosa, leaving most of it to readers’ imaginations, but the bits and pieces he did share are intriguing. However, despite all that’s said about the alleged supernatural effect of the play, the evil in this first tale turns out to be of the human variety. The alternate timeline is largely irrelevant in the other 3 stories, but here it serves a crucial purpose - to make Hildred’s claims sound possible. Why couldn’t there be an Imperial Dynasty of America? And of course, Hildred is fully convinced of what he’s thinking, like the fall from a horse and him being misdiagnosed. None of these are particularly outlandish explanations. Constance and her father’s reactions to him can be interpreted in 2 ways: they’re scared of what Hildred knows, or they’re trying not to upset a crazy man. When the truth is made clear, things become much worse than a weird book; the scene where Louis realizes the depths of his cousin’s madness was just scary. Using the Yellow Sign to mark the faithful reminded us of the seals given by God to protect the worthy during the End in the Book of Revelation, and this won’t be the last time things get a little Biblical.
We kept expecting some sort of twist with Wilde, who seemed to know so much. However, the way he handled the cat also made him look crazy - the wrong kind of crazy. That he has a yellow face and his overall look disturbs everyone but Hildred makes him look like a poor copy of the King in Yellow. In fact, after reading all 4 stories, Hildred, Wilde, and their scheme to gain earthly power, while still scary, also become a little comical - they’re children playing dress-up, too ignorant to understand the greater meaning of what they’ve learned.
THE MASK
Alec is in love with Geneviève, but while she likes him, she prefers Boris. Despite this, the three remain close friends. However, after Boris discovers a method to turn living matter into marble, tragedy strikes.
The last thing I recollect with any distinctness was hearing Jack say, “For Heaven’s sake, doctor, what ails him, to wear a face like that?” and I thought of the King in Yellow and the Pallid Mask.
We reread all the stories again before writing this review and the titular mask and its connection to the King in Yellow finally made sense; the romantic elements had pretty much drowned them before. From the start, it’s clear this isn’t going to have a happy ending. Since Boris was said to have died at 23 in The Repairer of Reputations and that’s the age he is here, it’s clear that things aren’t going to end well for him. With his eagerness to try his substance on ever bigger living creatures, this could’ve gone in a dark direction; unfortunately, Chambers made the tragedy a very predictable accident. That someone was going to fall on the pool of solidifying substance was obvious from the moment it was said that it was being kept in an open pool. Unlike the other stories, the play isn’t responsible for what happens; it just affects Alec, who falls ill shortly after finding it at Boris’s place, and in his delirium ends up facing the lies he’d been telling himself. And this brings us to the titular mask, which connects both to the King’s Pallid Mask and the mask Alec has been hiding behind ever since Geneviève told him she liked Boris more. In the beginning of the story there’s an ‘excerpt’ of the play, in which, in true The Masque of the Red Death fashion, the King reveals to the horrified onlookers that, unlike them, he’s not wearing a mask and has been showing his true face the whole time. So, is the face that scares Jack the effects of the play showing, or is it the true face Alec has been hiding visible for the first time after the mask has finally fallen? By the way, this is the second time The King in Yellow is associated with truth, as after Louis criticizes its author, Hildred replies that ‘It is a book of great truths’ (also, see the quote we used for The Repairer of Reputations).
We already mentioned that Alec falls ill after finding the play, but there’s more to it than just a fever. It’s unclear how much Alec read of the play or even if he read it at all, as all we get is: ‘I had found The King in Yellow. After a few moments which seemed ages, I was putting it away with a nervous shudder’. Whatever he did was enough to make him dream of Carcosa and the King in Yellow, but he manages to resist these visions of madness thanks to his sense of duty towards Boris and Geneviève. So, on one hand, that lame romance had a purpose - to help Alec prevail against the influence of the play; but on the other hand, this means that he was saved by the power of love, which is cheesy as hell. Later, he’s rewarded with the woman he’s been in love for years. But is it really Geneviève who returns to him? Boris jokingly tells Alec that the beam of light that they see every time he uses the solidifying liquid is the ‘vital spark of the creature escaping to the source from whence it came’. Could Geneviève have come back… wrong? Probably not, as Chambers didn’t seem to be going for an unhappy ending.
IN THE COURT OF THE DRAGON
A man with a guilty conscience sees himself be chased by a relentless pursuer whose success might mean his doom.
How his face gleamed in the darkness, drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows; the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes.
This is the shortest of the stories and is one long, desperate flight from the inevitable; the fear of the nameless narrator is palpable. He goes to church looking for some healing after suffering through 3 terrible nights due to reading The King in Yellow, but instead finds merciless judgement. We’re not given details of what he did, but it appears to have been murder; and in the end he realizes the man chasing him has the face of his victim. The supernatural effects of the play are presented in an ambiguous way - is the narrator seeing these things because they’re really happening, or is he mixing his guilt with the disturbing book he’s just read? After all, he’s ‘worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble’ after reading the play, which doesn’t exactly make him reliable. It’s more than what had happened so far, though. Also, the Biblical undertones become more obvious, with a direct quote (Hebrews 10:31) and the King as a judge of sinners and dispenser of punishment.
We like this story, but the more we think about it, the more it seems disconnected from the others. The Biblical stuff is just too much, and makes the King in Yellow less interesting.
THE YELLOW SIGN
A painter and his model are plagued by strange dreams and the disturbing presence of a creepy man. But at least he’s vowed never to read The King in Yellow, so it can’t possibly be the play’s fault… or can it?
Oh, the sin of writing such words, — words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words, — words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!
Chambers went back to the romance for this one, though this story is far better than The Mask. However, it still feels as if he devoted too much page-time to it, and there’s some annoyingly cryptic memories of a past love for Scott. Who is/was Sylvia and why should anyone care? Especially since he comes up with other very good reasons why a relationship with Tessie wouldn’t work. Apart from that, this a spooky tale in which Chambers abandoned all subtlety and ambiguity - not only is the supernatural in full display, but the Biblical metaphors are plainly visible. Scott’s studio is the Garden of Eden, and the moment the relationship between him and Tessie changes, they become extremely self-aware (no more posing nude!). There’s also a snake, as a certain play bound in snakeskin magically appears in Scott’s bookcase. The unravelling of their world seems to have begun much earlier, though, as Tessie says the dreams started after she found a mysterious symbol, which turns out to be none other than the Yellow Sign. Also, in the beginning, Scott mentions an organist from a nearby church, ‘a fiend in human shape (…) who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an interpretation of his own’, which brings to mind In the Court of the Dragon and is clearly not a good sign. Unlike in the previous stories, neither Scott nor Tessie actively looked for the play - it came to them. Was it perhaps a test to see if they were worthy of the Yellow Sign and after they gave in to temptation and read The King in Yellow, the King’s servant came to take it back?
WHAT? WHO? WHY?
Throughout the 4 tales, we’re told how the play drives whoever reads it mad. Louis certainly believes that, Alec is disturbed after picking it up, the nameless narrator was deeply shaken after reading it, and Scott vowed to avoid it. Hildred and Wilde are living proof of that, concocting an elaborate plan to steal a non-existing American crown and conquer the country. However, madness isn’t the only thing associated with the play - there’s also truth. In The Repairer of Reputations, Hildred calls it ‘a book of great truths’; in The Mask, we learn that the King wears no mask, and it’s while he’s under the influence of the play that Alec drops his; after the nameless narrator of In the Court of the Dragon reads it and goes to church, his image of devotion is shattered, revealing the murderer underneath before he’s taken away by the King; finally, there’s The Yellow Sign, an obvious Adam and Eve metaphor, in which doom arrives after Scott and Tessie read the play and ‘the Phantom of Truth was laid’. It’s also interesting that Scott doesn’t seem mad after what happened. He’s obviously deeply disturbed by it and dying, but he’s not mad - the knowledge, the truth, was just too much for him. All this reminded us of Mastermind in The Dark Phoenix Saga, written by Chris Claremont:
In the blink of an eye, Mastermind finds himself in touch with the universe - his brain flooded with all the myriad, absolute contradictory truths of existence. He screams. Unable to cope, he runs. Unable to escape, he drowns. He is, after all, only human - a man of limited power, limited ability, transformed in a twinkling into a god. Some people can handle the experience. Some people can’t.
The Dark Phoenix gave him a bigger push than the King in Yellow, but it feels similar to what we saw happen to Hildred, Alec, the nameless narrator, and Scott and Tessie.
And what about the King himself? Is he good or evil? At first glance, the answer appears easy. Of course, the King in Yellow is evil! In The Mask and The Yellow Sign, he’s a devilish tempter, trying to pull Alec to him with glimpses of Carcosa and its doomed inhabitants and putting the play in Scott and Tessie’s path. However, in In the Court of the Dragon, he takes the narrator to Carcosa as punishment for his past sin. Or maybe not. When he hears the organist, the narrator wonders if ‘something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church might have entered undetected’. So, either the King is in fact the Devil, or maybe he’s just using the narrator’s fears and Christian faith to target him. Near the end of The Yellow Sign, Scott says he ‘knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now’ which means that after he learned the truth about the King and Carcosa, he sees him as a being distinct from God and definitely not nice. But maybe he’s just misunderstood. After all, can a mere human truly understand the cosmic truth of the Pallid Mask?
As important as the nature of the King in Yellow are his motives and goals - what does he want? Is he just bored and likes messing with mortals for fun? Does he have a greater purpose? Is Carcosa a cautionary tale, like Sodom and Gomorrah? Or is it a real place, the previous stop of the King before he got to Earth? Is he hopping from world to world, sharing his poisoned truth and seeing how many give in? We will never know, and that makes it a little scarier.
VERDICT
We like these stories, except The Mask, but they’re not perfect. The Repairer of Reputations is the best one, but Chambers spent too much time establishing this alternate timeline, which he didn’t really use. As we wrote in the first review, it feels as if it exists mostly to make Hildred’s madness less obvious in the beginning. The Yellow Sign is almost as good, but unfortunately it drags thanks to Scott’s musings on romance and Sylvia, which seem to have been plucked from a different story. Also, the obviousness of the Biblical metaphor was a little too much. The spooky atmosphere and the new revelations about the play make up for any flaws, though. We’d put In the Court of the Dragon at the same level as The Yellow Sign. It’s pretty short, but very effective. The Mask is worth it for what it reveals about the possible meaning of the Pallid Mask and how it relates to the effects of the play, but the story around it is just bad. Definitely the worst of the bunch.
We can see how not explaining much about the King in Yellow, Carcosa, and the effects of the play helped make these stories more intriguing and memorable, but we still wished Chambers had written more about it. Then again, considering how his writing evolved, it’s probably better that he didn’t.