Episode 232: The King In Yellow Is Weirder Than Satanism

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• • From Supernatural Horror In Literature, HP Lovecraft, 1927: Much of the best in American horror has come from pens not mainly devoted to that medium. In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity to create a truly potent air of sinister menace. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales, including a case of moon-cursed vampirism near an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South Italian sea-coast. Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of the Gallic studio atmosphere. The most powerful of its tales is “The Yellow Sign”, in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman and a talisman down from accursed Hastur and primordial Carcosa. It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master.
  • From Robert W Chambers, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 2025: Chambers was a painter, illustrator, and author who published more than seventy novels, mostly historical and romantic works, increasingly popular but increasingly bad. In the first decade or so of his career, however, he wrote fantasy and horror, and some tales of direct interest. His most successful work was The King in Yellow, though only the first four stories deal significantly with the eponymous King in Yellow, the title character of a printed verse play, a text which drives its readers to despair, madness, and even death. The King may be described as a dark god, or as a Mysterious Stranger who is never seen except fatally. Chambers took the name Carcosa from Ambrose Bierce’s story, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” and it was from Chambers’ rendering that H P Lovecraft incorporated Carcosa into the Cthulhu Mythos as a magically charged name. Of the four King in Yellow tales, “The Repairer of Reputations” is of particular sf interest, being set in 1920, after the successful conclusion of a Near Future war with Germany in an America that has legalized suicide. The satirical strokes in which this Utopia is painted are simultaneously broad and ambivalent: the narrator, who was clearly insane before he read The King in Yellow, at points sees the world about him with the stripped eyes of a child. Also of interest is “The Mask”, which involves a sculptor who invents a chemical solution that turns living tissue into marble. Chambers’ “The Harbour-Master”, from another collection, anticipates The Creature from the Black Lagoon, while “The Maker of Moons” pits a protosSuperhero with ESP against an Asian Yellow Peril cult. Chambers tends to irritate those who encounter him, not because he was incompetent but because he was a potentially gripping writer who repudiated his gifts. https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/chambers_robert_w 
  • From Secret Chambers of the Heart, Paul St. John Mackintosh, LA Review of Books, 2020: Chambers is practically the Harper Lee of horror, having carved out an enduring reputation from an incredibly small body of work.”Author and game designer Kenneth Hite has recently released a gorgeously illustrated annotated edition of The King in Yellow. Hite noted that the thing that surprised him as he started working on his edition was just how little had been written and researched on Chambers: “I thought that I would find that real scholars of horror had done all the work, and I would just be able to read the five or six really top essays and I’d be done.” As it turned out, there was nothing aside from a trio of essays and a very unscholarly self-published biography. Chambers’ work was so popular in his lifetime as to secure him instant oblivion after it — except, of course, for The King in Yellow, one of a series of seminal horror works from the period, including The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Great God Pan, Dracula, and The Turn of the Screw. The 1890s were in a fever pitch of anxiety about decadence, moral and social rot, and political and military collapse. Chambers channeled this zeitgeist in part thanks to his own experience as an art student in Paris. 
    • The idea of a masked King in Yellow and a catastrophic confrontation at a decadent court may have come from the short story The King in the Golden Mask  by Marcel Schwob, as much as from Poe. Or perhaps it drew inspiration from Baudelaire’s Seven Old Men, where the poet observes seven identical beggars whose “yellow rags / imitate the color of this rainy sky.” The black stars of Carcosa turn out to be from the novel Florentine Nights, centering on a Satanic performance by Paganini. Oscar Wilde’s Salomé was first published in French in 1893, after being banned from performance in London in 1892: for that production, Wilde had Sarah Bernhardt dressed in yellow and decorated the stage in yellow, because of the traditional yellow badge for Jews in medieval Europe. Carcosa itself, of course, comes from Ambrose Bierce’s “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.” Chambers also gained something else from being on the ground in 1890s Paris: genuine horror at the prospect of death and madness from syphilitic infection, which he saw firsthand all around him. Maupassant died mad from syphilis in 1893, and Chambers had seen the example of countless lesser figures before him. Chambers’s terror in the face of syphilitic infection is far more grounded and legitimate than Lovecraft’s terror of subversive immigrants. Chambers duly generalized his personal fear of syphilis to a more widespread social anxiety about corruption and contamination, interwoven with the milieu of the Decadents and the avant-garde. “It is as though Decadence spreads like syphilis,” says Hite, ticking off the various associations of yellow with disease and decay — the quarantine flag, yellow fever, jaundice, etc. But the most effective propagation vector in the stories is the art itself. The idea of a work of art as a public danger and social hazard was very real in the ’90s. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-secret-chambers-of-the-heart-robert-w-chambers-and-the-king-in-yellow/ 
  • From Sleaze Nation, Peter Hall, The Guardian, 2002: How many plays were never written because of the presence of the Lord Chamberlain? For 200 years the Lord Chamberlain removed the adult, the accurate, and the outspoken from the British stage, as well as the lewd, the raucous, and the plain dirty. This meant the banning not only of Aristophanes or Henry Fielding, but of moralists such as Shaw and the great Ibsen himself. Harley Granville-Barker’s “Waste,” perhaps the best play of the early 20th century was banned for 20 years because it dealt with a politician’s affair outside marriage. Such things did not happen – or at least they were not admissible. Homosexuality was, of course, an unmentionable secret even in the mid-20th century, and the Lord Chamberlain was busy keeping it silent right up to his abolition in 1968. Club theatres such as the Arts Theatre flourished by producing immoral works, and bembers could be burnt to death in rooms without fire escapes or have their morals corrupted for a few pounds because the normal licensing laws, including the Lord Chamberlain’s writ, did not apply. Even Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge had to be performed in such clubs, because the plays implied homosexuality. Many of Shakespeare’s richest plays and finest lines, packed with erotic double meanings, would have been smartly excised by the Lord Chamberlain’s watchdogs. Censors always strive to be unaccountable, and they were triumphantly so at the end of the 19th century. A total ban on Shaw’s “Mrs. Warrens’ Profession” was enacted in 1893 and remained until 1925, and the 1890s brought the plays of Oscar Wild. The Lord Chamberlain’s office was largely staffed by retired naval officers with extraordinarily filthy minds. They were so alert to filth that they often found it when none was intended. From the middle of the 18th century, every word, every action performed, had to be approved and licensed by royal officials. This control applied only to the theatre, not to publishing, journalism, broadcasting or film. Some have seen this as a compliment to the potency of theatre; it is more likely a repression by which our drama was kept immature and parochial for 200 years. It’s not the money or the sex – it’s the excitement: Censorship is a way to avoid change and make sure that society remains static. It is a means of exerting power, preventing debate and discouraging challenge, however it is dressed up “to protect young minds”, “to safeguard national security”, or “to prevent civil unrest.” ​​https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2002/oct/02/theatre.artsfeatures 
  • From Colour in The King in Yellow, Antonín Brož, University of Pardubice, 2021: The last decade of the nineteenth century, known as the ‘yellow nineties,’ was filled with dramatic changes in society. Artistic trends such as Symbolism, Aestheticism, and Decadence catalysed a new understanding of colours and a different view of their interpretation. Yellow became the colour of the hour, the symbol of the times. It was associated with all that was bizarre and queer in art and life, and all that was outrageously modern. The tradition of Goethe’s moral and symbolic values for colours developed elaborate schemes of symbolic correspondences during the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, the yellow colour appears in rather negative connotations at the end of the century, and discourses of color, racial politics, physical infection, and moral corruption become entangled together. It is no coincidence that many of the authors that turned to these color tropes in their fiction were also amateur artists, such as Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy. Considering the close connection between painting and literature in the period, one cannot fail to notice Joris Karl Huysmans’ literary rebirth within his purely painterly family. Unlike his ancestors, Joris Karl used the pen instead of the brush, yet retained precisely the same richness of color. The Yellow Sign indicates madness, damnation, or death, but it cannot be assigned a single meaning. Yellow is a sign of decadence, loss of faith, and feeling distant from god, as people turn from the Christian cross to the Yellow Sign, the symbol of a fallen deity and decadence. The decline of society goes hand in hand with the loss of faith, as  Darwinism makes questions about the origins, nature, and destiny of humankind matters for science rather than theology. Loss of faith is illustrated by the story In the Court of the Dragon, where the main character, after reading The King In Yellow, loses the main pillar of life. His guilty conscience is portrayed by a black-figured organist, and this personification of heresy haunts the main character and, as an indomitable idea, is ever on his heels.
  • From the Repairer of Reputations, Robert W Chambers, 1895: The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results. On the contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and above all ambitious. There was only one thing which troubled me: During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time The King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease from city to city, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged, but human nature could not bear the strain of words in which perfect poison lurked. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon; when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask.
  • From The Mask: Picking up a book at random, I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found The King in Yellow. After a few moments, which seemed ages, I was putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above, and a cry came from the sick-room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next moment he called, “Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you. Alec, come here.” Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly, and resisted Boris’ gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and sank back, closing her eyes, and then—then—as we still bent above her, she opened them again, looked straight into Boris’ face—poor fever-crazed girl!—and told her secret. At the same instant our three lives turned into new channels; the bond that held us so long together snapped forever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb, I bowed my head, while my face burned like a live coal and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me with its clamour. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. Boris turned a bloodless face to mine. “It is not your fault, Alec; don’t grieve so if she loves you—” but he could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room, saying—“Ah, the fever!” The last thing I recollect with any distinctness was hearing Jack say, “For Heaven’s sake, doctor, what ails him, to wear a face like that?” and I thought of The King in Yellow, and the Pallid Mask. I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, “I love you, but I think I love Boris best,” told on me at last.
  • From In The Court of the Dragon: In the Church of St. Barnabé, vespers were over; the clergy left the altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in the stalls. There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ voluntarily ceased. I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting. Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the French quality of taste. Today, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse, a sinister change. It set me thinking of what my architect’s books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered if that had been the case here, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church might have entered undetected and taken possession of the west gallery. I felt in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was something being hunted. Poor devil! whoever he was, there seemed small hope of escape! Who was doing this? How dare he play like that in the midst of divine service? Thus far I had not found the rest I had counted on. I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble, for I had been reading The King in Yellow. “My children,” said the preacher, “one truth the human soul finds hardest of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see that nothing can really harm it.” Curious doctrine I thought, for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he will reconcile that with the Fathers.”“Nothing can really harm the soul,” he went on, “because——” But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, and the man coming out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery the same way. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had returned, I would have seen him. I could not look away from his black figure and his white face. He turned and sent across the church straight into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any other like it; would to god I might never see it again! Then he disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less than sixty seconds before. 
  • From The Yellow Sign: When I first saw the watchman, his back was toward me. I looked at him indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I had forgotten him. But late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again, and as he raised his head and looked at me, instantly I thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a disturbed grub in a chestnut. I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the colour out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not understand how I could have painted such sickly colour into a study which before that had glowed with healthy tones. I’d made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can’t see how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas.” The more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed, I strove to arrest it, but now the colour on the breast changed and the whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge. “Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,” Tessie announced. “Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,” I said.
    • There was not a soul in the park as I passed along the trees and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on the stone steps. In spite of myself a chill crept over me at the sight of the white puffy face, and I hastened to pass. Then he said something which might have been addressed to me or might merely have been a mutter to himself, but a sudden furious anger flamed up within me that such a creature should address me. For an instant I felt like wheeling about and smashing my stick over his head, but I walked on, and entering the Hamilton went to my apartment. For some time I tossed about the bed trying to get the sound of his voice out of my ears, but could not. It filled my head, that muttering sound, like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. And as I lay and tossed about, the voice in my ears seemed more distinct, and I began to understand the words he had muttered. They came to me slowly as if I had forgotten them, and at last I could make some sense out of the sounds. It was this: “Have you found the Yellow Sign?” “Have you found the Yellow Sign?” “Have you found the Yellow Sign?” I was furious. What did he mean by that? Then with a curse upon him and his I rolled over and went to sleep, but when I awoke later I looked pale and haggard, for I had dreamed the dream of the night before, and it troubled me more than I cared to think. 
  • The Yellow Sign, 2001, Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osq5c2gkZdw 
  • From More Light, James Blish, 1970: “What do you know about Robert Chambers?” “I read some of his stuff in college. I liked his stories about his art student days in Paris.” “Then you remember The King In Yellow?” “Vaguely. It was one of the first hoaxes, wasn’t it? An imaginary book, like the Necronomicon. Are you about to tell me you’ve discovered the play in your cellar and been haunted ever since?” “I do in fact have the play,” Atheling said. I sat back, completely at a loss. Nobody peddles that nonsense anymore. “Well who wrote that dreadful work then, as if I didn’t know?” “You don’t know and neither do I. I’m pretty sure it was Chambers himself. Interesting you mention the Necronomicon, because it was through Lovecraft I got the play in the first place. If my copy is real, it’s the only one. I have not been able to finish reading it. There is a point in the play at which I have to quit. It varies, from reading to reading, by a line or so on one side or the other, but I do know the place I haven’t yet been able to go beyond.” “May I suggest a very simple expedient?” “Sure, turn to the last page. I’ve done that. I know how it ends. I’ve read every line of it. I want to know how far you get, the first time through.” “I’ll finish it,” I said. He handed me the folder to me. Well I was hooked, or anyway prepared to be amused and , if possible, admiring his ingenuity. Inside it was what would have been the most brittle sheaf of yellow, brown-edged second sheets in the world, had they not been carefully encased in plastic. I bore them off. Then I poured myself a sizable slug of brandy and began to read.
  • From The King In Yellow, Thom Ryng, 1999: The King In Yellow was written in 1890 by an anonymous French playwright and published later that year. The play and its author were quickly denounced by the church, and the play was banned by Paris authorities and suppressed by the police in 1891. So far as is known, it was never performed. Subsequent English editions appeared in London and Edinburgh in 1892, and Chicago’s Columbian exposition of 1893. Rumors abound that the anonymous author committed suicide, though a reviewer of the time opined that “bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that.” The play is known today chiefly by the writings of American author Robert W Chambers. The play was terrifying not because it contained any great evil, but rather because, prefiguring the surrealist and postmodernists, it exposed the truth as a phantom and, anticipating Lovecraft, revealed the essential hopelessness of man’s search for meaning in a cold and dispassionate universe. Although Chamber’s book has been in print for much of the past century, no English edition of the play itself has appeared since 1893. In 1995 I undertook a new translation, working from a cheaply bound photocopy I found in a stall in Paris in the mid 1980s. Private readings were held in 1996 and 1997, and last of these was attended by members of a company who expressed interest in performing the translation. For possibly the first time since, four showings of the King in Yellow were performed at the Old Capitol Theater in Olympia Washington in 1999. The dead author’s curse was not limited to the Phantoms conjured in the script. There were theater and personnel problems of all descriptions. Even the technical staff insisted that ghosts were disrupting their work. The format of this, the first edition in over a century, sticks as nearly as possible the original edition of 1890. I salute the courage of the publishers, who feel as I do that this work, so insinuating for its time, has to be reprinted. I’m indebted to Scott Glancy, who did not shoot his way out of the theater during the Press rehearsal.
  • Review of Impossible Landscapes, Paul St John Mackintosh, 2021: Impossible Landscapes started life as a stretch goal in Arc Dream’s original Kickstarter campaign to resurrect Delta Green. To say that it’s been eagerly anticipated is a massive understatement. Any old-time Call of Cthulhu fan who wants tentacles and noodly appendages is going to be disappointed. This is not a monster mash, or even a body horror adventure: the horror is existential, psychological and surreal. In keeping with the book’s persistent themes, many of the menaces are automata or puppets. Creatures long associated with the King in Yellow Mythos, like Byakhee, hardly put in an appearance. However, that departure from 40 years of Lovecraftian RPG tradition is exactly where Impossible Landscapes succeeds best. No one should be surprised to hear that this campaign is a meat grinder. Mundane death is the least of the threats facing agents, who are more than likely going to be either driven mad or sucked into the nightmare realm of Carcosa. This is a game you can experience, but cannot win. If you’re exceptionally lucky, and skillful, you might get to return to your old life more or less intact. But there’s no keeping the ultimate terror at bay. There’s a persuasive case that Delta Green, and Lovecraftian horror in general, are all about the limits of human agency when faced with the utterly inhuman. The King in Yellow will always be on his way, today or (maybe thanks to your actions) tomorrow, but never delayed for too long. Impossible Landscapes over-delivers on its promise and premise by the poisonous yellow bucketful. An immediate, indispensable, classic. https://paulstjohnmackintosh.com/a-review-of-delta-green-impossible-landscapes/