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.
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
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....