The King in Yellow
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
The King in Yellow
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
FictionClassicsHorrorShort Stories
7h 45m listening
3.51from 32,338 ratingson Goodreads
"The King in Yellow" by Robert W. Chambers is a collection of short stories published in 1895. The book opens with supernatural horror tales connected by a forbidden play that drives readers to madness. A mysterious entity called the King in Yellow, an eerie Yellow Sign, and the cursed play itself haunt the first four stories, set in a future 1920s America and Paris. The collection gradually shifts tone, ending with romantic tales, but the opening horror stories have earned acclaim as classics of weird fiction.
Contains spoilers for the entire book
- Themes
- Atmosphere
About the book
Published in 1895, The King in Yellow is a collection of stories by Robert W. Chambers, the first four of which are linked by a fictional play of the same name. Its first act seems harmless, but those who read the second are said to be driven to madness or despair, and the play, with its lost city of Carcosa and its mysterious Yellow Sign, haunts the characters who encounter it. Chambers sets these stories in a strangely altered New York and in Paris, and the later pieces in the book turn to romantic tales of art students in the Latin Quarter. The four weird tales, especially “The Repairer of Reputations” and “The Yellow Sign”, were admired by H. P. Lovecraft and have had a long influence on horror and weird fiction.
Characters
Hildred Castaigne — The Repairer of Reputations
An unreliable narrator whose reading and grandiose ambitions draw him into a disturbing imagined order.
Mr. Wilde — The Repairer of Reputations
A strange recluse who claims to repair reputations and encourages Hildred's schemes.
Boris Yvain — The Mask
A sculptor whose extraordinary experiment entangles art, desire, and danger.
Geneviève — The Mask
A woman whose attachment to Boris and friendship with the narrator place her at the center of the story.
Tessie — The Yellow Sign
An artist's model troubled by dreams and by a sinister figure near the studio.
The King in Yellow — Figure in the forbidden play
The mysterious figure associated with the unsettling play that recurs through the collection's opening stories.
About the author
Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933) was an American writer and artist, born in Brooklyn, New York. He studied art at the Art Students League in New York and then for several years in Paris, at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, and on his return worked as an illustrator for magazines including Life and Vogue. His first book, In the Quarter (1894), drew on his student years in Paris, and the following year he published The King in Yellow, whose linked tales of a forbidden play became a landmark of weird fiction. Chambers soon turned away from the supernatural to historical novels, many set during the American Revolution, and then to a long series of romantic society novels that made him one of the best-selling and highest-paid American authors of the early twentieth century. He published more than seventy books, and died in New York in 1933.