Robert W. Chambers · 1895
Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow (1895) is a collection of ten short stories unified less by plot than by a single corrosive idea: a play, also called The King in Yellow, whose second act drives every reader who finishes it to madness or despair, and whose fragments — the drowned towers of Carcosa, the Lake of Hali, the tattered King himself and his mute, terrible sign — surface only in quotation and half-explained dread across the book's first four stories, a direct ancestor of Lovecraft's own mythology; the remaining six leave the supernatural behind for a wistful tale of a hunter lost outside his own century, a set of allegorical prose poems, and four stories drawn from Chambers's own years as a Paris art student, moving from the Siege of Paris to the light comedy of the Latin Quarter, and this Obscura Classics edition preserves the book's French, dialect, and invented mythology exactly as printed, alongside a modern-English edition that renders the prose in plainer language without softening or explaining any of it away.
The free sample is 13% of the book.
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