Book Review: The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories

The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories
Published by Dover, 2004 (orig. published 1970)

A fascinating introduction to this compilation of short stories (originally published in 1970, reprinted in 2004). E.F. Bleiler, the S.T. Joshi of his time (minus the Howard hate and the political doggerel), begins The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories with a less than complimentary overview of Robert W. Chambers’ literary legacy, stating outright that nearly everything written by Chambers was trash aimed at the lowest common denominator reader (in most cases, housewives without a proper education). One can hardly argue with the facts: Mr. Chambers famously admitted that he’d rather re-arrange the antique furniture in his cabin than sit at the typewriter, inferring that his stories were written for the paycheck – nothing more, nothing less. What I found most scathing in Bleiler’s assessment of Chambers’ work is that he believes the material isn’t even worth reading as period nostalgia. Hell, Bleiler even criticizes a number of short stories he handpicked for this collection! This gave me the impression he needed to fill the pages with something and had little choice but to include the least-worst Chambers stories he could find.

Yet Mr. Bleiler concedes there is one notable exception to the inane and substandard fiction churned out by the workmanlike Chambers… a chilling series of tales published in 1895 as The King in Yellow.

I’d say for the most part Bleiler is right on both fronts. I mean, I’m partially shocked that such an inflammatory introductory essay was allowed to be included in a book like this (what if you picked up a Shakespeare reader and some pseudo-intellectual bookworm introduced the text with something like: “You know what? I think old Bill was a bit of a hack, don’t you?“), but, as I say, Bleiler is right on the money with some of his critiques. Chambers does not strike me as a very good writer at all. Personally, after the first few stories, getting through the remainder of the tome was a nose to the grindstone job – the attempts at humor are appalling, the token romance shoehorned into virtually every story quickly becomes tired and trite, the man had no clue how to pace a piece of short fiction decently, and, well… the ideas behind most of the stories are just not all that engaging or creative. Chambers obviously aimed to emulate Poe and Verne, at least in his horror and science-fantasy stories, but he was a poor-man’s imitation at best.

Still, this book may be worth picking up from a library at least, if only for the opening story, “The Yellow Sign” (which was the fourth story in the original publication of The King in Yellow). It may only last a scant twenty pages, but during those twenty pages Chambers was playing on the same pitch as Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe instead of watching from the stands, offering up a moody, cautionary tale with a strangely likable yet completely unsavory anti-hero who probably gets what he deserves in a shocker of a climax. I found “The Yellow Sign” to be the most effective horror story from Chambers, simply because the author doesn’t even attempt to explain the otherworldly terrors contained within the pages of the forbidden book the characters read from, instead describing their near-instantaneous descent into madness and shortly thereafter… death. It’s a remarkable tale, and surely the best thing Chambers ever wrote.

Alt-history fans may find the surreal “The Repairer of Reputations” of interest (although it was a ‘dark future’ style of fiction at the time it was written). A bleak 1920′s New York (complete with government sanctioned ‘Lethal Chambers’ for those who wish to legally commit suicide) serves as the backdrop for a twisted tale told by a dilettante cum mad recluse. The colorful cast of characters is arguably the highlight of this story – the quirky, deformed old man who lives with a vicious feral cat, the armorer with skeletons in his closet, and of course, the unreliable narrator who seems to have gone insane from either an accidental fall onto his head or from reading the second act from The King in Yellow… or both.

From there though, things start to take a turn. Even the remaining stories culled from the original King in Yellow aren’t nearly as gripping as the first two stories of this collection. “The Demoiselle d’Ys” is the first tale to be plagued by a vapid romance (with such dialogue clunkers as: “I, who am unworthy of the lightest of your thoughts, I who abuse hospitality and repay your gentle courtesy with bold presumption, I love you.“) and major pacing problems, and it only snowballs from there. Later tales in the collection, such as the three stories from In Search of the Unknown, are barely classifiable as horror stories as the title of this collection would suggest. They’re definitely intended to be science-fiction first and foremost, but as previously mentioned, Chambers also did a less than stellar job of aping Jules Verne, so these stories are not exactly essential reads. Perhaps the nadir of the collection is “The Maker of Moons”, which has serious identity problems. I suppose it was originally intended to be a horror story, but the sense of carefree lightheartedness inserted into the text by Chambers turns it into utter frippery.

Ultimately, I see The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories as nothing more than a curio for fans of horror fiction wishing to know more about the Jurassic period of the genre. Chambers’ lofty position in the pantheon of horror luminaries befuddles me. The main reason I picked this book up in the first place was to discover just what Howard, Lovecraft, and some of the other Jazz Age writers saw in Chambers’ fiction (that, and I’ve always been taken with the Hastur mythos from the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and really wanted to investigate the origins once and for all). With The King in Yellow alone, I can see how such a work influenced a writer like HPL, but it still strikes me as the literary equivalent of a one-hit wonder band (and even then, only a few of the short stories in The King are worth anything). Chambers peaked there and then. Either he just stopped caring about artistry as he got older, or he shot his creative load with The King in Yellow and resigned himself to writing trash for cash for the rest of his career.

Or maybe, as E.F. Bleiler cheekily suggests, Chambers had a bit of help from something beyond our ken…