
Essay by Ted Gioia
Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) wrote at least 87 books, but only one is still
read today. The King in Yellow is a strange and marvelous collection of short
stories, first published in 1895, but still capable of stirring up readers in the
21st century. In 2014, sales spiked again when The King in Yellow was touted
as the “one literary reference you must know” to understand the award-
winning TV show True Detective. But
producer and script writer Nic Pizzolatto
came to Robert W. Chambers late in the
game. This pioneer of genre fiction had
already inspired H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond
Chandler, Robert Heinlein, Stephen King,
Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, and
many other authors, not to mention
video game developers, rock bands,
filmmakers and other creative spirits.
But what a strange, indefinable book it is.
The King in Yellow is typically classified
as a collection of weird tales, but that
captures only a small part of this work,
which starts out with a science fiction
story and ends up with Chambers' attempts
at romantic comedy. Clearly the volume
stakes out the author’s claims as a genre
writer, but the reader is left to puzzle over
which genre. The horror stories, for which
Chambers is best known nowadays, all
appear in the first half of the book, and the
second half is so radically different that one might be excused for wondering
whether a different writer had taken charge of it.
Fans delighted by these weird tales have sought for others in Chambers’ later
publications. But they have little to enjoy in these other works. More than 90%
of his output focused on stories outside the horror genre. His greatest
successes during his lifetime came with flamboyant romance tales, such as The
Fighting Chance (1906) and The Younger Set (1907), both bestsellers in their
day, and probably considered very dicey by the standards of their time. Books
such as these helped Chambers live in the grand style. He resided in a
mansion in upstate New York, where he collected Asian art and devoted his
idle hours to hunting and fishing.
Readers of The King in Yellow get a taste of this side of Chambers in the last
two stories, the novellas "The Street of Our Lady of the Fields" and "Rue
Barrée." Here we find stylishly-written forerunners to the genre romances of
our own day. Charming but sentimental men fall head over heals in love with
young ladies from lower social strata. Chambers hints at scandalous and
sensual activities, but always stops short at describing anything that might
upset a censor or legal authority. These stories are written with grace and
occasionally suggest that this author might have been capable of a masterpiece
of social realism. His eye for detail is acute, and his characters know how to
take charge of a scene. But Chambers makes clear his low ambitions at the
conclusion of each of these romances, when he reaches for the most
sentimental and obvious way of resolving his tales.
But no one reads Robert W. Chambers for his
romance stories nowadays. If you abandon The
King in Yellow after page 100, you will have
acquainted yourself with the main works that
inspired Lovecraft and later purveyors of weird
tales. The first five stories in the collection are
exceptional, and if Chambers had devoted more
energy to works of this sort, he might rank today
among the masters of non-realist fiction. Instead
he is mostly remembered as a footnote in the history
of the horror tale, a figure who influenced other,
greater talents.
I would call your attention to the opening story in this volume. "The Repairer
of Reputations" ranks among the finest nineteenth century works of genre
fiction, and I place much of my faith in this author's potential greatness on the
evidence of this one magnificent story. The tale is ostensibly a science fiction
story, and seems to anticipate the advent of World War I. But Chambers is
bursting with ideas and every page threatens to go off in a new, unexpected
direction. Elements of other genres start appearing, and threaten to take over
the story. Perhaps this is a crime story, or a horror story, or a romance, or a war
story.
The constant shifts in subject and bizarre juxtapositions even allow us to praise
"The Repairer of Reputations" as a forerunner of 20th century absurdist and
postmodern literature. Parts of this crazy work remind me of Borges, Calvino
and Nabokov, and at times I wondered whether Chambers wasn't aiming to
parody genre literature in this tale. But I eventually concluded that he was
dead serious, and no deconstruction is intended. Yet how many 19th century
stories of this sort incorporate an unreliable narrator and so many other
elements that we associate with fiction of a century later?
We even find a forerunner here of the "deadly entertainment" that looms large
in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. And though I can comprehend why this
concept—in essence, the notion of a piece of consumer entertainment that
destroys the minds of its audience—appealed to a visionary author who wanted
to critique pop culture at the close of the 20th century, I am both befuddled
and intrigued by a writer in the Victorian era who came up with the identical
idea. In the case of Chambers, the fatal diversion is a dramatic work called "The
King in Yellow," which destroys the lives of anyone unfortunate enough to
make its acquaintance.
Here too we find hints of the homemade mythology that stands out in
Chambers’ oeuvre. This is perhaps the most influential aspect of his work, and
set the stage of the Cthulhu Mythos of Lovecraft’s stories, and the many other
alternative universes of later fantasy and science fiction. The reader hears
breathless rumors about mythical places (some borrowed from the writings of
Ambrose Bierce) such as Carcosa, Hastur, Yhtill, and Aldebaran. Chambers
only hints, in the most oblique manner, at what these names represent, but
they contribute to the dark and ominous tone that pervades his weird tales.
This aspect of Chambers’ work obviously
fascinated Nic Pizzolatto, who suggest in
the following dialogue from True Detective,
that modern-day crimes might have a
connection to these mythic signifiers:
"He said that there's this place down south
where all these rich men go to, uh, devil
worship. He said that, uh, they—they
sacrifice kids and whatnot. Women and
children all got—all got murdered there
and, um, something about someplace
called Carcosa and the Yellow King."
Chambers includes sly references to Carcosa
and "a “King in Yellow" in some of the later
stories, but by then he had either lost interest
in the concept, or (perhaps more likely) lacked
the ambition to build his private mythology into
something grander. Indeed, the modest goals
of this author are his chief weakness. I can't
help agreeing with the verdict issued on Chambers by Lovecraft, who stated
that this predecessor was "equipped with the right brains and education but
wholly out of the habit of using them." In a similar vein, Chambers’
contemporary Frederic Taber Cooper offered the following equivocal praise:
"So much of Mr Chambers' work exasperates, because we feel that he might so
easily have made it better."
The remaining stories in The King in Yellow
are less iconoclastic than "The Repairer of
Reputations," but four of them are outstanding
works and deserve the attention of anyone interested
in the history of the horror tale. "The Mask" draws
on a favorite subject of this author, the romantic
exploits of artists in Paris, but here a sculptor invents
a new technique for turning living creatures into
vividly realistic statues. If Lovecraft had been an
American ex-pat living in France, he might have written
a story of this sort. Two subsequent tales, "In the
Court of the Dragon" and "The Yellow Sign" draw on
a familiar trope of horror fiction: the protagonist is
haunted by a frightening individual in the neighborhood.
In the former instance, the villain is a malevolent church organist and, in the
latter, a creepy church watchman. The plots here are fairly predictable, but
the writing is strong and the mood intense. "The Demoiselle of Y's" is a more
peculiar story, combining gothic horror, romance and time travel in a striking
manner. It reminds us of Chamber’s skill at mixing a range of genre styles,
and leads me to speculate that the core of his greatest successes lay in his
knack for combining the distinctive ingredients of each in surprising new
hybrids.
But at this stage of The King in Yellow, not quite the midway point of the
volume, Chambers loses steam. He inserts a few pages of eccentric prose
poems that seem to suggest that this book may turn into something avant-
garde and otherworldly. But then our author fills the rest of his collection with
romance stories about Parisians, polished in their own way, but an unwelcome
intrusion into a book that warrants consideration as a masterpiece of strange
fiction.
So I carp and complain. But don’t let my laments dissuade you from reading
this book—or at least reading the first half of it. The best parts of The King in
Yellow are masterful. Under slightly different circumstances, Chambers might
have been the great horror author during that long 70-year interlude between
the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft. Alas, he wasn't. Instead, we must
assign that honor elsewhere, probably to Bierce or Machen. So if I chastise
Robert W. Chambers, it is merely because he got so caught up in developing his
talent that he neglected his genius.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to
Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
Publication Date: April 25, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia
To purchase, click on image
|
The Author of 'The King in Yellow'
Could Have Been the King of Horror
Robert W. Chambers Left Behind 87 Books, but is
Remembered for Just One, Very Strange Volume
To purchase, click on image
|
Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/tedgioia
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The Foundation Trilogy
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I, Robot
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The Handmaid's Tale
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A Clockwork Orange
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Ender's Game
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The Kingdom of This World
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Chambers, Robert W.
The King in Yellow
Chiang, Ted
Stories of Your Life and Others
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Childhood's End
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A Fall of Moondust
Clarke, Arthur C.
2001: A Space Odyssey
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
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Little, Big
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The Fifty Year Sword
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House of Leaves
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Nova
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
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The Man in the High Castle
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Ubik
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VALIS
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Camp Concentration
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The Genocides
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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
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The Obscene Bird of Night
Ellison, Harlan (editor)
Dangerous Visions
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I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
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Like Water for Chocolate
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To Your Scattered Bodies Go
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A Maggot
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Aura
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American Gods
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Neverwhere
Gibson, William
Burning Chrome
Gibson, William
Neuromancer
Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum
Greene, Graham
The End of the Affair
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The Magicians
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The Forever War
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The Raw Shark Texts
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The Centauri Device
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Light
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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
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Heinlein, Robert
Time Enough for Love
Helprin, Mark
Winter's Tale
Herbert, Frank
Dune
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The Woman in Black
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Practical Magic
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Submission
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Brave New World
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The Haunting of Hill House
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The Turn of the Screw
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Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
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Suddenly, A Knock at the Door
Keyes, Daniel
Flowers for Algernon
King, Stephen
Carrie
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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Gods Without Men
Lafferty, R.A.
Nine Hundred Grandmothers
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Dispossessed
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Lathe of Heaven
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The Left Hand of Darkness
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The Big Time
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Conjure Wife
Leiber, Fritz
Swords & Deviltry
Leiber, Fritz
The Wanderer
Lem, Stanislaw
His Master's Voice
Lem, Stanislaw
Solaris
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The Fortress of Solitude
Levin, Ira
Rosemary's Baby
Lewis, C. S.
The Chronicles of Narnia
Link, Kelly
Magic for Beginners
Lovecraft, H.P.
Tales
Malzberg, Barry N.
Herovit's World
Mandel, Emily St. John
Station Eleven
Mann, Thomas
Doctor Faustus
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100 Years of Solitude
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Wittgenstein's Mistress
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Hell House
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I Am Legend
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What Dreams May Come
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The Road
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Perdido Street Station
Miller, Jr., Walter M.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
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Dangerous Laughter
Mitchell, David
Cloud Atlas
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Behold the Man
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The Final Programme
Morrison, Toni
Beloved
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1Q84
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the
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Nabokov, Vladimir
Ada, or Ardor
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The Time Traveler's Wife
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Ringworld
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Vurt
Obreht, Téa
The Tiger's Wife
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At Swim-Two-Birds
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The Famished Road
Percy, Walker
Love in the Ruins
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Tales of Mystery & Imagination
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Gateway
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The Color of Magic
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Gravity's Rainbow
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Interview with the Vampire
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Red Mars
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Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone
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Blindness
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Dimension of Miracles
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Mindswap
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Store of the Worlds
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Frankenstein
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Dying Inside
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Nightwings
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The World Inside
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City
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The Trouble with Tycho
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The Rediscovery of Man
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Snow Crash
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More Than Human
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Some of Your Blood
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The Languages of Pao
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Around the Moon
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From the Earth to the Moon
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Last Stories and Other Stories
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Cat's Cradle
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Infinite Jest
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Hieroglyphic Tales
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The First Men in the Moon
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Cloudstreet
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Orlando
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The Bear Comes Home
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Lord of Light
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This Immortal
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Notes on Conceptual Fiction
My Year of Horrible Reading
When Science Fiction Grew Up
Ray Bradbury: A Tribute
The Year of Magical Reading
Remembering Fritz Leiber
A Tribute to Richard Matheson
Samuel Delany's 70th birthday
The Sci-Fi of Kurt Vonnegut
The Most Secretive Sci-Fi Author
Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
Robert Heinlein at 100
A.E, van Vogt Tribute
The Puzzling Case of Robert Sheckley
The Avant-Garde Sci-Fi of Brian Aldiss
Science Fiction 1958-1975: A Reading List
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Parts of this crazy
work remind me of
Borges, Calvino and
Nabokov, and at
times I wondered
whether Chambers
wasn't aiming to
parody genre literature...
Under slightly different
circumstances, Chambers
might have been the great
horror author during that
long 70-year interlude
between the death of Poe
and the rise of Lovecraft.
Alas, he wasn't....