The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by the American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The book is named after a play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed horror stories, and the book has been described by critics such as E. F. Bleiler and T. E. D. Klein as a classic in the field of the supernatural. Lin Carter called it "an absolute masterpiece, probably the single greatest book of weird fantasy written in this country between the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft."
There are ten 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.
The British first edition was published by Chatto & Windus in 1895.
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 and gothic entity known as the King in Yellow
An eerie symbol called the Yellow Sign
These stories are macabre in tone, centering, in keeping with the other tales, on characters who are often artists or decadents, inhabitants of the demi-monde.
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. These stories are haunted by the theme: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?"
The macabre character gradually fades away during the remaining stories, and the last three are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers' later work. They are all linked to the preceding stories by their Parisian setting and their artistic protagonists.
List of stories
Illustration of Tessie in "The Yellow Sign", from a 1902 edition of the book
The stories in the book are:
"The Repairer of Reputations" - A story of egotism and paranoia which carries the imagery of the book's title.
"The Mask" - A dream story of art, love, and uncanny science.
"In the Court of the Dragon" - A man is pursued by a sinister church organist who is after his soul.
"The Yellow Sign" - An artist is troubled by a sinister churchyard watchman who resembles a coffin worm.
"The Demoiselle d'Ys" - A time travel love story.
"The Prophets' Paradise" - A sequence of eerie prose poems that develop the style and theme of a quote from the fictional play The King in Yellow which introduces "The Mask".
"The Street of the Four Winds" - An atmospheric tale of an artist in Paris who is drawn to a neighbor's room by a cat; the story ends with a tragic touch.
"The Street of the First Shell" - A war story set in the Paris Siege of 1870.
"The Street of Our Lady of the Fields" - Romantic American bohemians in Paris.
"Rue Barre" - Romantic American bohemians in Paris, with a discordant ending that playfully reflects some of the tone of the first story. (wikipedia.org)