An uneven collection of ten stories, The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1865 – 1933) is the author’s best known work (today) and largely due to its first four stories which have a weird, supernatural quality to them.
All the stories in the collection are wonderfully atmospheric, be it of a horror or romantic variety, or combination of both, but like the collection as a whole they are often uneven. Many of the stories meander as the author searches for an ending, often without success, particularly in the book’s more romantic second half.
To be fair, while a reader today is quite likely to find them overly sentimental and overwrought (as I do), it is likely that they were not perceived that way at the time they were written. At least, they might not have been quite so off-putting with their hyperbolic language.
The book’s title, The King in Yellow, refers to a play that, when read, horrifies the reader with the first act’s final lines and drives them mad as they continue to read the play in its entirety.
The play itself, though quoted, does not exist. It’s a fiction Chambers uses as a literary device for the collection’s first four or five stories. It’s intriguing in its use. Within stories, Chambers refers to characters from earlier stories, and elements from earlier stories appear in later stories. However, ultimately it is unsatisfying as the idea is never fully fleshed out or concluded.
It’s actually a very odd book in that it has such wonderful potential within it and creates such wonderfully moody scenes yet never quite gets there, in the earlier weird stories, and takes a left turn in the later stories to almost histrionic romance.
As curiosities go, it’s a tremendously engaging book initially yet even as an intriguing curiousity it falters and is eventually a disappointing book for the potential lost.
As an aside, I found the first of the stories, The Repairer of Reputations, the most fascinating and engaging of the stories. Perhaps that is why I feel a bit let down by what followed it.
(Originally written and published on July 12, 2014)