The King in Yellow

Robert W. Chambers’s short story collection The King in Yellow (1895) features interconnected narratives with recurring characters as well as a hideous play entitled The King in Yellow that induces madness in anyone who reads it. Such figures from that play as Cassilda, Camilla, and especially the King in Yellow himself have gone on to inspire dozens of writers to write stories inspired by Chambers’s conception—which he himself derived in part from Ambrose Bierce. Included in the volume are such tales as “The Repairer of Reputations,” which depicts a nightmare future of euthanasia chambers and a man who battles the King in Yellow for rulership of the world; “The Mask,” a story of a woman turned into marble; “The Yellow Sign,” a work of gruesomeness and morbidity; and “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” in which a man drifts insensibly into the medieval past. After a series of prose poems, “The Prophet’s Paradise,” The King in Yellow concludes with several tales of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, in which Chambers—who studied art in Paris before writing his book—chronicles the grimness of war and the struggles of civilians to survive in its midst.