Robert W. Chambers: Ysonde Trilogy

We confess we don’t know much about Robert W Chambers’ work beyond his stories featuring the accursed play The King in Yellow (reviewed here), and were convinced he had immediately switched to writing more conventional stuff. We skimmed The Prophet’s Paradise, but it didn’t seem to be worth it apart from The Sacrifice. However, more recently, we became aware of a second collection featuring more “weird” stories: The Maker of Moons (1896). Since the first 3 - The Maker of Moons, The Silent Land, and The Black Water - are linked by the same character, Ysonde, we thought it might be interesting to read and review them. Warning: SPOILERS.

If in the King in Yellow tales, the supernatural became ever more visible until it was impossible to ignore, here, the opposite happens. In the THE MAKER OF MOONS, we get magic, a powerful sorcerer, strange creatures, and mentions of a fantastical city, Yian, whose description is worthy of any sword and sorcery tale. Here, Ysonde is a mysterious, beautiful woman from elsewhere, who doesn’t know more than what her gold-making stepfather has told her, makes impossibly perfect sculptures, and meets the narrator, Roy, in a part of the woods no one else is able to find. Later, one of Roy’s friends, Barris, explains that he lived in Yian, where the Maker of Moons made the woman of his dreams before taking her and their daughter, whom he believes to be Ysonde, from him. The ending involves this powerful entity trapping Roy and Ysonde, who are bound together by destiny, and the creature he made, a monstrosity living in the lake and which can produce strange reptilian insects that work as part of it. However, Chambers gave readers a twist in the very end that reminded us of The Repairer of Reputations - as the narrator finishes writing his letter to the government warning them of the danger that still lurks in the Cardinal Woods, Ysonde interrupts him and calls the story “silly nonsense without a shadow of truth or foundation”. Could this mean that Roy was mad and none of that happened? Beyond that, the story was a mixed bag, wasting time with the unnecessary gold makers plotline, and then revealing the information that actually matters in an info-dump that felt lacking for such complicated connections. This also made Barris more important for the story than Roy — after all, he’s the one that has a history with the Maker of Moons, his gang of evil sorcerers, and Ysonde herself — and though he does get to face his enemy, it made us wonder why he wasn’t the lead.

While reading the second story, THE SILENT LAND, we came up with several theories that were completely quashed by the ending. So, once more, we have a man meeting a mysterious woman in an equally mysterious part of the woods, with whom he becomes smitten. Here it’s Louis, who’s staying with his friend Ferris at their cottage where they spend most of the time fishing and arguing about which is the best fly. They have a British valet, Howlett, whom Louis mocks, just like one of Roy’s friends in the previous tale. “Ferris” also sounds a lot like “Barris”, and both characters end up serving the same purpose. Louis has a pet Red Ibis, Solomon, and before he meets his mystery woman, he sees a strange bird that he identifies as a Spirit-bird, Oiseau Saint-Esprit, which seems to point to some deep symbolic meaning. Diane is more modern than Ysonde, and her meetings with Louis happen in a silent part of the woods where they roleplay, sing songs (well, she does, 2 of them, which Chambers wrote down), and tell stories, or try to. There are 2 mentions of the King in Yellow, which gave us hope that this was going somewhere interesting. The first one is when Diane asks Louis for a story about battles and he starts “There was once a King in Carcosa”; he never finishes it and is followed by Diane’s singing. The second one is in Ferris’s dialogue explaining who Diane is - Diane’s father killed Ferris’s and when Ferris found him, he killed himself, causing his daughter to disappear. This time we get a bit more: “There was once a King in Carcosa (…) And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies”. The ending of Louis and Diane’s story is dreamlike, and it’s not quite certain what is happening or why. Is the priest Ferris invited over for next day’s breakfast to marry Diane and Louis, or to exorcise the place? There’s more than enough material to speculate about the deeper meaning of it all and how the 2 stories are connected. To us it looked like someone trapped in a simulation/curse, with bits of real memories slipping into the fantasy world. Ysonde’s chiding of the narrator in the first story could be because she was worried he was starting to remember. She could be a witch, a psychic parasite, another illusion! And then the ending happened. Like before, we get Ysonde expressing her disapproval of the story we just read, but here, the writer promises to do better in the next one, The Black Water, which is the last of Chambers’ trilogy. Going back to the ending of The Maker of Moons, it doesn’t sound like a madman reveal anymore, but rather Ysonde being dismissive of her husband’s creative writing… Even though this didn’t bode well, we kept reading - after all, it was only one more tale.

We figured that maybe THE BLACK WATER wasn’t going to explain Ysonde and everything that was going on, but it would surely reveal what Chambers had intended for this trio of weird stories. Well, we were right, but unfortunately, what he had in mind was a love story more grounded in reality with very little in common with the previous ones. So, Bobby is an artist in love with Ysonde, who came to the Rosebud Inn with her aunt Lynda after Lynda’s husband died. She’s like a Disney princess, beloved of all forest creatures, and she and Bobby have a pet porcupine named Ridiculous Billy. They seem to spend their days flirting and playing tennis. After an injury that he fears could ruin his chances with her, they, Aunt Lynda, another guest at the Rosebud Inn, and 2 guides, walk into the woods to go fish in the Black Water. The Black Water is longer than The Silent Land, so in the beginning, we thought that things might go in a different direction halfway through; however, as we kept reading and the odds of that happening got smaller and smaller, we struggled to accept that this enterprise had been a waste of time. If we had been reading for ourselves, we probably would’ve skipped to the end or at the very least skimmed it, instead of carefully reading the whole thing. Because we weren’t, we didn’t. The only plot is Bobby’s budding romance with Ysonde - will they end up together? Will his injury affect anything? - and the only truly strange thing that happens is the attack by a panther and the aggressive behaviour of the bobcats when the group is trying to take Bobby to safety. Despite Ysonde’s apparent bond with the animals, there’s not even a hint that she might be responsible. Aunt Lynda’s husband was also killed by a panther, but the story establishes no connection between the 2 events, which makes it look like a weird coincidence. Not only is there nothing here, but it also retroactively kills the theories about the previous 2 stories. All they’re good for after this is to provide some red flags about how the “writer” views Ysonde. While all 3 versions are essentially Manic Pixie Dream Girls, the Ysonde that shows up in this last tale and is presumably closest to the “real” woman, isn’t the vulnerable maiden in need of rescue of The Maker of Moons and The Silent Land. And yet, that’s how her husband decided to write her. Twice.

VERDICT

We almost didn’t write this review because we honestly didn’t know what to say. The stories were a disappointment. The Maker of Moons has a whole storyline that simply isn’t needed, and after the revelatory info-dump rushes to an ending that, when you think about it, isn’t really an ending, rather the writer just stops because his wife tells him he’s written enough for the day. If its predecessor has too much plot, The Silent Land has practically none. Most of it is spent on fishing talk (really, there’s a lot of it) and Louis and Diane managing to tell very little about themselves to each other, with the story taking a turn for the cryptic near the end; and that’s before Chambers gives readers a similar ending to The Maker of Moons, only this time, it’s clear that instead of a madman/prisoner, we’re dealing with a writer and his disapproving wife. The Black Water drops the supernatural elements and focuses solely on the love story, which, despite featuring an attack by a panther and some occasional humour, isn’t particularly interesting. This trilogy reminded us more of The Demoiselle D’Ys, where the supernatural is just there to facilitate the love story, than Chambers’ most famous work. The worst part about these stories is that, at times, the more fantastical elements almost felt like a parody of the cryptic horror of The King in Yellow. Was this Chambers’ The Unnamable? Whatever it was, it was probably a good thing that he gave up on Horror and Fantasy.