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The King in Yellow
Spine #1
Author
Robert W. Chambers
Translator
First Edition
1895
Heathen Edition
December 15, 2017
Refreshed
January 26, 2024
Pages
274
Heathen Genera
Victorian Grit
Paperback ISBN
978-1-948316-01-9
Hardcover ISBN
978-1-963228-01-4
“What is it?” I asked.
The King in Yellow.
I was dumbfounded. Who had placed it there? I had long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me to open it, I had never even looked at it in bookstores. If I ever had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous mottled binding as I would at a snake.
“Don’t touch it...”
Robert William Chambers (1865-1933) was an American illustrator and writer, best known for The King in Yellow, his influential and odd collection of ten macabre and French short stories first published in 1895. The title refers to a fictional play featured in four of the stories, and to a mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity within that play who may very well exist outside of it. It is whispered that the play leaves only insanity and sorrow in its wake; it tempts those who read it, bringing upon them hallucinations and madness . . .
Influencing the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and Nic Pizzolato (creator and writer of HBO’s True Detective), and described by critics as a classic in the field of the supernatural, The King in Yellow — with its dashes of fantasy, mystery, mythology, romance, and science fiction — is a staple of the early gothic and Victorian horror genres.
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"Very genuine is the strain of horror . . . really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear."
H.P. Lovecraft
Heathenry
Contents
Praise
Details
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Heathenry
From the 2017 First Edition:
We’ve used the original 1895 F. Tennyson Neely text for our edition of The King in Yellow, cross-referenced with two additional print editions: 1902 Harper & Brothers and 1962 Ace Books. Various spelling discrepancies between the three editions (chiefly British versus American spellings) were inconsistent and perplexing enough that we opted to go with American spellings throughout the entirety of our text (except a quote or two), with additional nips and tucks for readability, but only if our edits did not forsake the author’s original intention or connotation.
From the 2022 Second Edition:
We’ve added what we’ve titled “Lovecraft on Chambers,” which is an excerpt from H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, in which Lovecraft briefly discusses the work of Robert W. Chambers, and provides some context for The King in Yellow’s revered place in the pantheon of supernatural fiction.
As for the text, after reading through the book again — cover to cover, twice — we’ve added 83 footnotes in addition to our original 91, for a grand total of 174. Most of those are translations of French terms or phrases that we skipped over in the First Edition, but since our translating skills have vastly improved over the course of twenty books, we decided to tackle them this time around. Additionally, we have revisited and revised some of the First Edition translations.
Since The King in Yellow is a collection of stories with some of those stories separated into parts, we’ve updated the rectometer for this Second Edition to meter the individual parts rather than the story as a whole, which also means that some parts will have a verso or left-hand start rather than a recto.
To learn more, check out the Second Edition intro: Let Us Preface — Take Two, or the First Edition intro: Let Us Preface or: How We Began.
And you can read Chambers’ no-bullshit thoughts on writing here: Writers on Writing: Robert W. Chambers
Contents
Second Edition Contents
- Heathenry: Let Us Preface — Take Two
- Lovecraft on Chambers
- The Repairer of Reputations
- The Mask
- In the Court of the Dragon
- The Yellow Sign
- The Demoiselle d’Ys
- The Prophet’s Paradise
- The Studio
- The Phantom
- The Sacrifice
- Destiny
- The Throng
- The Jester
- The Green Room
- The Love Test
- The Street of the Four Winds
- The Street of the First Shell
- The Street of Our Lady of the Fields
- Rue Barrée
Praise
“Very genuine is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear . . . The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is ‘The Yellow Sign.’” –H.P. Lovecraft
“The King in Yellow remains today a masterpiece of its kind, and with the work of Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce, shares the distinction of having contributed to the famed Cthulhu mythos of H.P.Lovecraft.” –August Derleth
“The King in Yellow and his legendary city of Carcosa may be the most famous character and setting you’ve never heard of . . . It should not be surprising that Lovecraft incorporated Chambers’ The King in Yellow into his overarching Cthulhu mythos.” –Michael M. Hughes, io9.com
“Chambers’ King in Yellow is the more successful precursor to Lovecraft’s Cthulu. He’s a being who makes the reader shudder not because of how he looks or what he does, but because he inspires such eloquently expressed terror in the characters who encounter him.” –Etelka Lehoczky, NPR
“It is a masterpiece . . . I have read many portions several times, captivated by the unapproachable tints of the painting. None but a genius of the highest order could do such work.” –Edward Ellis
“The most eccentric little volume of its day, The King in Yellow is subtly fascinating, and compels attention for its style, and its wealth of strange imaginative force.” –Times Herald
“Mr. Robert W. Chambers does not have a system to work up to; he has no fad, save a tendency to write about the marvelous and the impossible; painting pictures of romance that have a wild inspiration about them. Descriptive powers of no mean quality are perceptible in this volume of stories.” —The New York Times
“Every story of The King in Yellow has something riveting about it . . . so perfectly realized, they became the model for much of twentieth-century horror/fantasy. The horror comes from character, superbly rendered detail, and an uncanny ability to suggest rather than declaim. ‘The Repairer of Reputations’ is one of the finest stories in the English language.” –New York Press
“Authors like Chambers were restrained in defining every detail of the universes they created, while taking pains to suggest that there is just so much more happening beneath the surface . . . It’s the very indirectness of the way he references The King in Yellow, these little drops of the hat, that has caused later writers to be so fascinated by what he explicitly left unsaid.” –S.T. Joshi
“Although The King in Yellow has been an obscure reference indeed for most of the last hundred years, it was truly ahead of its time. It is one of the first fictional meta-books, a literary device that has been used since by authors as diverse as Agatha Christie, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, and Vladimir Nabokov . . . It also happens to echo the best principles of great modern design: It’s what isn’t there that makes it so appealing.” –John Brownlee, Fast Co.
Details
The King in Yellow
Heathen Edition #1Format: Paperback
Format: Hardcover
Published: January 26, 2024
Cover: Matte Finish
Interior: Black & White on Cream Paper
Language: English
Illustrations: 4
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