The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories

The King in Yellow was a creepy little thing that surprised me with how contemporary it feels despite it being quite old. While the length, and the fact that it is more a short story collection, held it back from having a bigger impact, some of the stories were quite good.

The King In Yellow is a seemingly "haunted" play that makes an appearance in each of our four stories of this book. Sometimes it drives those who read it mad, other times it simply exists in the periphery of strange goings on in different peoples lives across town. In our first story, we follow a man who is quite mad after reading the work, existing in a feedback loop of delusion with his "mentor" as he is convinced he is heir to a throne, but only his cousin's existence is holding him back. Our second story follows a trio of friends who learn about the horrible and beautiful phenomenon surrounding a basin of liquid that converts anything submerged in it into pure stone. Our third story follows a man, after having read The King in Yellow, is wracked with paranoia about a man who attends his church following him, and possibly being the devil. And our final story is about a painter and his model, who has recently read the play, becoming paranoid about an unsightly watchman that is posted outside of the studio.

These each fell somewhere between slightly interesting and a bit dull, but given that each is so short, it doesn't really feel fair to describe them as dull since they're over so quickly. But I certainly liked more than others, namely the first two. The work doesn't go much into what the actual play The King in Yellow is, or why it has these effects. We only ever get small glimpses of the play in interstitial passages between each story, but I think that enhanced this book as a whole, I don't really WANT to know exactly how and/or why it does what it does, I like the mystery. But I acknowledge others might care.

That's all there really is to say about this, it is so short there isn't much to chew on or reflect upon, but it was enjoyable.

In the autumn of 1998, I found myself walking the oak-lined streets of an old city, on a sultry subtropical night. I looked up through the narrow alley between the branches, and saw the rubicund light of Aldebaran gleaming at me. I was at a dead-end in my studies, and knew it, and had no better plans. At the moment the star's light fell on me, I felt a change; my frustration with my life slipped away, replaced by a bittersweet longing for another life I had known only in my dreams. It was soon after that I came into possession of a small press's library-bound edition of The King In Yellow. I had heard it mentioned, of course, in Lovecraft's "Supernatural Horror in Literature", but in those days, the book was not widely reprinted, nor well-known outside of the small weird fiction community.

Oh, the poisonous beauty of it! The hints that lead you on to a precipice over the cloud-waves of Hali, and leave you there, unsatisfied and precarious!

I'll not spoil the experience for you, except to note that the Paris art student stories of the second half of the book, so often thought to be out of place in this collection, actually have subtle ties to the better-known horror stories.