The King in Yellow

For The Dead Milkmen album, see The King in Yellow (album).

The King in Yellow
Cover of the first edition
Author(s)	Robert W. Chambers
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Supernatural & Horror
Publisher	F. Tennyson Neely
Publication date	1895
Media type	book
Pages	316

The King in Yellow is a collection of tales of the supernatural by Robert W. Chambers, named after a fictional play with the same title that recurs as a motif through some of its stories and first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. Described by S.T. Joshi as a classic in the field of the supernatural, it contains 10 stories, the first four of which, "The Repairer of Reputations", "The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon" and "The Yellow Sign", mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it. "The Yellow Sign" inspired a film of the same name released in 2001.

Stories

The first four stories are loosely connected by three main devices:

• A play in book form entitled The King in Yellow
• A mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity known as The King in Yellow
• An eerie symbol called The Yellow Sign

These stories are macabre in tone, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents. The first and fourth stories, "The Repairer of Reputations" and "The Yellow Sign", are set in an imagined future 1920s America, whereas the second and third stories "The Mask" and "In the Court of the Dragon" are set in Paris.

The other stories in the book do not follow the macabre theme of the first four, and most are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers' later work. Some are linked to the preceding stories by their Parisian setting and artistic protagonists.

List of stories

The stories present in the book are:

• The Repairer of Reputations
• The Mask
• In the Court of the Dragon
• The Yellow Sign
• 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
• Rue Barrée

The play called The King in Yellow

The imaginary play The King in Yellow has two acts and at least three characters: Cassilda, Camilla, and "The Stranger", who may or may not be the title character. Chambers' story collection excerpts sections from the play to introduce the book as a whole, or individual stories. For example, "Cassilda's Song" comes from Act 1, Scene 2 of the play:

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

The short story "The Mask" is introduced by an excerpt from Act 1, Scene 2d:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?

Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

It is also stated, in the "The Repairer of Reputations" that the final moment of the first act involve the character of Cassilda on the streets, screaming in a horrified fashion, "Not upon Us, oh king! Not upon us!".

All of the excerpts come from Act I. The stories describe Act I as quite ordinary, but reading Act II drives the reader mad with the "irresistible" revealed truths. "The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect." Even seeing of the first page of the second act is enough to draw the reader in: "If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it [...]" ("The Repairer of Reputations").

Chambers usually gives only scattered hints of the contents of the full play, as in this extract from "The Repairer of Reputations":

He mentioned the establishment of the Dynasty in Carcosa, the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of the Hyades. He spoke of Cassilda and Camilla, and sounded the cloudy depths of Demhe, and the Lake of Hali. "The scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever," he muttered, but I do not believe Vance heard him. Then by degrees he led Vance along the ramifications of the Imperial family, to Uoht and Thale, from Naotalba and Phantom of Truth, to Aldones, and then tossing aside his manuscript and notes, he began the wonderful story of the Last King.

A similar passage occurs in "The Yellow Sign", in which two protagonists have read The King in Yellow:

Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.

Influences

Chambers borrowed the names Carcosa, Hali, and Hastur from Ambrose Bierce: specifically, his short stories "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" and "Haïta the Shepherd". There is no strong indication that Chambers was influenced beyond liking the names. For example, Hastur is a god of shepherds in "Haïta the Shepherd", but is implicitly a location in "The Repairer of Reputations", listed alongside the Hyades and Aldebaran.

Possible influences may include Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death". Its synopsis is similar to Chambers's imaginary play: a masquerade is held by decadent members of the aristocracy. They isolate themselves from the outside world where the Red Death, a plague, reigns supreme. At the end of the masquerade, a stranger appears, wearing a bloodied shroud and a mask figuring a Red Death victim. When the shocked dancers try to unmask him, they find nothing but an empty shroud and a Mask; then they die from the plague, one by one. In both stories, colors have an ominous importance and the strangers are both portents of death and destruction.

Other texts, especially from the symbolist writers, may have influenced Chambers as well: "Le Roi au masque d'or" ("The king in the gold mask"), a short story written by Marcel Schwob—a French novelist and a friend of Oscar Wilde—was published in 1893 while Chambers was still studying in Paris. In this story, a king rules a city where all inhabitants are masked. One day, a strange blind beggar comes into his palace. After meeting with the beggar, the king, believing he's afflicted by leprosy, feels compelled to remove his mask; he then tears his own eyes out and leaves his city. A beggar now, the former king heads toward the faraway "city of the wretched" but dies before the end of his journey.

It is also possible that the play Salomé by Oscar Wilde, published in 1893, was another symbolist source of inspiration for The King in Yellow. Like The King in Yellow,^{[citation needed]} Salomé was originally written in French before being translated; it was then banned in Britain because of its scandalous reputation. Wilde's play in one act involves a queen, a princess, a king, and an ominous prophet clad in camel's hair dress, Iokanaan, whose appearance may bring untold and terrible events. The ominous language used, the drama, and the feeling of unease and expectation evokes Chambers's play; on page one of Salomé, the moon is described as a "little princess who wears a yellow veil"; on pages three and nine, the young Syrian says, "How pale the princess is! Never have I seen her so pale." On page 16, the young Syrian is named by Salome: his name is Narraboth and he beseeches Salome to avoid looking at Iokanaan and, finally, commits suicide. Marcel Schwob corrected the original French version of Salomé on behalf of Oscar Wilde.^{[citation needed]}

Brian Stableford pointed out that the story "The Demoiselle d'Ys" was influenced by the stories of Théophile Gautier, such as "Arria Marcella" (1852); both Gautier and Chambers' stories feature a love affair enabled by a supernatural time slip.

Cthulhu Mythos

H.P. Lovecraft read The King in Yellow in early 1927 and included passing references to various things and places from the book—such as the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign—in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931), one of his seminal Cthulhu Mythos stories. Lovecraft borrowed Chambers' method of only vaguely referring to supernatural events, entities, and places, thereby allowing his readers to imagine the horror for themselves. The imaginary play The King in Yellow effectively became another piece of occult literature in the Cthulhu Mythos alongside the Necronomicon and others.

In the story, Lovecraft linked the Yellow Sign to Hastur, but from his brief (and only) mention it is not clear what Lovecraft meant Hastur to be. August Derleth developed Hastur into a Great Old One in his controversial reworking of Lovecraft's universe, elaborating on this connection in his own mythos stories. In the writings of Derleth and a few other latter-day Cthulhu Mythos authors, the King in Yellow is an Avatar of Hastur, so named because of his appearance as a thin, floating man covered in tattered yellow robes.^{[citation needed]}

In Lovecraft's cycle of horror sonnets, Fungi from Yuggoth, sonnet XXVII "The Elder Pharos" mentions the last Elder One who lives alone talking to chaos via drums: "The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide a face not of this earth...."

In the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game published by Chaosium, the King In Yellow is an avatar of Hastur who uses his eponymous play to spread insanity among humans. He is described as a hunched figure clad in tattered, yellow rags, who wears a smooth and featureless "Pallid Mask." Removing the mask is a sanity-shattering experience; the King's face is described as "inhuman eyes in a suppurating sea of stubby maggot-like mouths; liquescent flesh, tumorous and gelid, floating and reforming."

Although none of the characters in Chambers's book describe the plot of the play, Kevin Ross fabricated a plot for the play within the Call of Cthulhu mythos.^{[citation needed]} According to Ross' version, the play is set within the fantastical alien city, Yhtill, adjacent to Aldebaran. The plot centers on the members of the city's royal family and their struggle for the throne. Their normal lives are disturbed when they hear of a mysterious stranger who is carried to the city by winged demons (assumed to be byakhee), who openly wears the Yellow Sign and an eerie "Pallid Mask". At the same time, everyone begins seeing a mirage of a city on the other side of the Lake of Hali. The city's upper towers are hidden behind one of the planet's two moons.

The royal family question the stranger, who calls himself the Phantom of Truth, but he only gives cryptic answers and claims to be an emissary of the terrible mythical being known as the King in Yellow, or Last King. At a masked ball honoring the royal family, the Phantom of Truth reveals that his "Pallid Mask" is not a mask, but his true face. Outraged, the queen and high priest torture him to death, but learn nothing in the process. As the Phantom of Truth dies, the King in Yellow arrives from across the Lake of Hali, driving most of the population insane as the mirage-city across the lake vanishes. The King in Yellow informs the royal family that Yhtill has now become the city of Carcosa, under the rule of the King in Yellow. The play ends with the royal family awaiting their imminent doom.

Other appearances

Literature

• Karl Edward Wagner used it as a motif in his novella The River of Night's Dreaming.
• Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels contain references to Aldones, Camilla, Cassilda, Carcosa, the cloud Lake of Hali, Naotalba, and Hastur. Though Hali is a city by a lake, the characters and places do not otherwise resemble Chambers' characters.
• Some writers have attempted to write a full or partial text for the imaginary The King in Yellow, including James Blish in his short story "More Light", Lin Carter ("Tatters of the King", 1986), and Thom Ryng (The King in Yellow, 2000).

• "The King in Yellow" is the name of a 1938 short story by Raymond Chandler. It is a crime story in which the narrator has apparently read Chambers' book, and uses the phrase to describe one of the other characters.
• Vincent Starrett wrote a poem called "Cordelia's Song from The King in Yellow", which was published in the April 1938 issue of Weird Tales.
• Robert Silverberg used the exchange between Camilla, Cassilda and the Stranger as the epigraph to his 1967 novel Thorns.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, Zeb Carter mentions the King in Yellow's "world" as one to be avoided.
• Stephen King, in his novel Thinner (written under the pen-name Richard Bachman), includes a reference to the "King in Yellow" as a head shop from which the protagonist's daughter buys an item.
• Brian Keene's short story "'The King,' in: Yellow", recounts the story of a modern-day couple who attend a performance of the play performed by "actors" who strongly resemble deceased singers and musicians such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix—and Elvis Presley as "The King".
• The King in Yellow makes an appearance in the final volume of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.
• Paul Edwin Zimmer's Dark Border series used a number of the names that feature in The King in Yellow, including Hastur, Hali, and Carcosa.
• The Doctor Who novel The Death of Art, by Simon Bucher-Jones, starts with a reference to "Naotalba's Song", and includes the art students from Chambers as incidental characters.
• Cleveland Moffett wrote two supernatural stories collected in the book The Mysterious Card (1912) that were influenced by the stories in The King in Yellow, although they do not refer to any of the names in Chambers' work.
• Joseph S. Pulver has written nearly 30 tales and poems that are based on and/or include The King in Yellow, Carcosa, and other elements from Chambers' stories. Pulver also edited an anthology of new fiction related to The King in Yellow, titled A Season in Carcosa, released in 2012 by Miskatonic River Press.
• Michael Cisco's short story collection Secret Hours contains the short story He Will Be There, based around The King In Yellow mythology and dedicated to his friend Joseph S. Pulver.
• Lawrence Watt-Evans adopted the name for the immortal high priest of Death in a series of novels--The Lure of the Basilisk, The Seven Altars of Dusarra, The Sword of Bheleu, and The Book of Silence—collectively known as The Lords of Dûs.
• The King in Yellow is the antagonist of Miyuki Miyabe's YA fantasy novel The Book of Heroes.
• Simon Green mentions The King in Yellow as a deity possibly worshiped by the older members of the Londinium Club in The Unnatural Inquirer, a book in the Nightside series.
• Anders Fager's book Collected Swedish Cults contains the short story The Queen In Yellow

Music

• Blue Öyster Cult's song "E.T.I. (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence)", from the 1976 album Agents of Fortune, refers to "the King in Yellow and the Queen in Red".
• In 2002 Rainfall Records released a CD called The King in Yellow by The Society of The Yellow Sign (a name taken from a story by Joseph S. Pulver), containing songs and spoken-word pieces and songs based on Chambers' creations.
• British black metal band Anaal Nathrakh have a song called "The Yellow King" on their 2006 album Eschaton, as well as a quotation from the book in the liner notes.
• Belgian extreme metal band Ancient Rites have a song "Dim Carcosa" on the album of the same name; its lyrics are directly based on "Cassilda's song" from The King in Yellow.
• Toyah's 1982 album The Changeling includes a song, "The Packt", that includes the first two quoted couplets of Act I in its lyrics.
• The title track of The Forgotten King by the Scottish Blood Metal band Achren makes several references, with the quote "I wear no mask" spoken repeatedly at the start of the song.
• Belgian ambient band For Greater Good included the song "Le Jugement Du Roi En Jaune" (French for "The Judgement of the Yellow King") on their 2008 self-titled full album; the song is based upon the play The King in Yellow.

Games

• The Call of Cthulhu role-playing game has featured the Hastur mythos and the King in Yellow over the years; one prominent example is the campaign Tatters of the King which also includes extracts from the play, as well as an early scene in which the player characters attend an ill-fated performance.
• Dungeon Magazine Issue 134 featured an adventure for ninth level characters by Matthew Hope called "And Madness Followed", featuring a bard who performed The King in Yellow for increasingly larger communities, each time warping the populace into Far Realm horrors.
• The King in Yellow is the title of an expansion to the Lovecraft-themed Arkham Horror adventure board game, involving a troupe of actors who intend to perform the eponymous play. The King himself does not appear, but if the play is performed to its conclusion, it drives the entire population of Arkham insane.
• The videogame Persona 2: Eternal Punishment for PlayStation features Hastur as a summonable Persona. The tarot card from which he is summoned is known as the "King in Yellow" card, and is of the Tower arcanum.
• The King in Yellow is the name of heavy occult magical text usable as a weapon in Namco's Tales of Phantasia game.
• The final boss in Magicka is a powerful being called Assatur (alternative name of Hastur), the King in Yellow, who threatens to destroy the world.
• An unabridged copy of the play and a crown referencing this book can be found in Dungeons of Dredmor. They would be useful equipment for a player character who practiced necromancy.
• In the role-playing game Dark Souls, there is a hidden non-player character named "Xanthous King Jeremiah." His name, along with the descriptions of his bright yellow clothing, imply a subtle reference to The King in Yellow.

Other

• In 2001, director Aaron Vanek and writer John Tynes adapted much of the book's content into a film titled The Yellow Sign.
• Carcosa Seri Negara, a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was built as the residence of Sir Frank Swettenham, the first British Resident-General of the Federated Malay States, in 1896-1897. He named it after the city in The King in Yellow.

Further reading

• Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. 
• Rehearsals for Oblivion: Act 1 - Tales of The King in Yellow, edited by Peter A. Worthy, Elder Signs Press 2007
• "Strange Aeons 3"' (an issue dedicated to The King in Yellow, edited by Rick Tillman and K.L. Young, Autumn 2010
• The Hastur Cycle, edited by Robert M. Price, Chaosium 1993
• The Yellow Sign and Other Stories, edited by S.T. Joshi, Chaosium 2004
• Watts, Richard; Love, Penelope (1990). Fatal Experiments. Oakland, CA: Chaosium. ISBN 0-933635-72-9. 

External links

• The King in Yellow at Project Gutenberg
• The King in Yellow at yankeeclassic.com
• The King in Yellow at sff.net
• The King in Yellow title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• "The King in Yellow": An Introduction by Christophe Thill
• The Yellow Site, an external wiki