The King in Yellow and Other Tales: The Essential Robert W. Chambers

There is a play called The King in Yellow. Those who finish it are doomed to madness.Robert W. Chambers published The King in Yellow in 1895, then spent much of the rest of his career writing historical romances and popular fiction. The weird fiction he left behind is a small body of work with an unusually long reach; Lovecraft absorbed its mythology into his own, and a century later it was heavily referenced in the first season of the HBO series True Detective. Chambers may have turned away from this vein, but the power he found there has never entirely dissipated.This Winter Hart Press edition presents the complete The King in Yellow alongside the best of Chambers's supplementary weird and macabre fiction — eighteen selections in all, tracing every significant territory his imagination explored before his literary ambitions turned elsewhere.The King in Yellow — completeThe four Carcosa horror stories at the collection's core:The Repairer of Reputations — a near-future 1920s New York of legalized death, militarism, private madness, and imperial delusion; Chambers's most ambitious and unsettling Carcosa taleThe Mask — an artistic discovery in a Paris studio promises perfect preservation while threatening to abolish life itselfIn the Court of the Dragon — a man seeks refuge in a Paris church after reading the forbidden play, only to find one of weird fiction's purest images of pursuitThe Yellow Sign — an artist's studio, a model, a mysterious emblem, a deathly figure below the window, and horror approaching slowly enough that the reader almost welcomes itThe collection's remaining six pieces — "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," and "Rue Barrée" — show Chambers moving between dread, romance, Parisian bohemia, war, art, and melancholy inside the same imaginative world.The supplementary talesThe Maker of Moons and The Black Water — the Ysonde sequence: occult conspiracy and hidden alchemy in the Adirondack woods, followed by its more elegiac continuationThe Purple Emperor · Pompe Funèbre · The Messenger · Passeur · The White Shadow — five Breton tales from The Mystery of Choice, moving from murder, a mystery involving rare butterflies, and rural superstition to ghostly visitations, funeral omens, and a ferryman's call across water that may be an invitation from the deadThe Harbor-Master — a zoologist investigating reports of a living sea-creature on the northern coast finds something the rational world is not equipped to fileNew editorial AdditionsThis is a fully annotated reading edition. It includes a biographical essay on Chambers's life and career; a critical introduction examining the Carcosa mythology, its Decadent sources, its debts to Ambrose Bierce and Baudelaire, and its influence on Lovecraft and later weird fiction; a headnote before each story; explanatory annotations clarifying foreign phrases, historical references, and literary allusions; and a full sources consulted list.The play exists. The King in Yellow still lurks on the periphery. And the tatters of sanity still remain. Read more