Despite widespread popularity during his life, American author Robert W. Chambers is now largely unknown. I first encountered him in the place I believe he is most commonly found, as a footnote in writings about far more celebrated author H. P. Lovecraft. While Chambers wrote far more than the 1895 collection of short stories The King in Yellow, indeed the same collection that inspired much of Lovecraft’s tone, very little positive can be said of the rest of his writing. For the most part, the rest of his weird fiction is lacking in both the subtlety and the psychological intensity of The King in Yellow, and the less that is said of his historical fiction, the better. It is likely due to the fact that The King in Yellow is perhaps the only exception to the general rule of low quality in Chamber’s work that he is so underappreciated.
This is not to say that the collection is without some cultural impact, even outside of its well-documented influence on Lovecraft. However, much of what has been drawn from it is surface-level. Within the fictionalized 1920s that the short stories inhabit, a play confusingly also titled “The King in Yellow” has been published and spread, with a second act that drives the reader insane. Snippets of the play and names from its characters and setting are interspersed in the collection, and it is largely these (many of which Chambers himself ironically took from from the 1886 story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa”) which have found their way into modern author’s vocabularies. The iconic visual of the king himself, shrouded in a bright yellow cloak, likely comes from the collection’s iconic cover and not the vague descriptions of the king in its second story, “The Mask.”
All of this is to say, The King in Yellow (the collection, not the fictional play), is not entirely forgotten so much as its influence has far outpaced its readership. While this is admittedly a general tendency in media of all kinds, (and indeed perhaps the indication of a truly influential work), there seems to be little interest in viewing the work outside of its teleological placement as a sort of evolutionary missing link in a timeline of American horror short stories between Poe and Lovecraft. This reading, however, betrays a lack of interest in, and indeed perhaps even a lack of having thoroughly read, the collection itself. Even to place Chambers’ writing as belonging to a distinctly American canon feels odd, considering the significant number of stories within The King in Yellow set in France (where Chambers studied as a painter), and the frequent use of French in epigraphs and dialogue throughout. Painters, sculptors, models, and costumes spill off the pages in a distinctly non-American flavor of decadence.
You may be at this point wondering what is even in this collection that merits any of this attention. Herein lies the difficulty of writing on The King in Yellow, but also what makes the collection so endlessly interesting to me. While there is some vague sense of thematic coherence, and certain motifs appear with some frequency (art, masks, militarism), The King in Yellow utterly refuses to be understood in its entirety as being any one particular thing. The eponymous play, whose maddening influence can be seen plainly in the first half of the collection, is entirely absent in its second half. For all of its status as a collection of horror, stories like “The Demoiselle d’Ys” approach a baffling sort of pastoral science-fiction romance. “The Prophets’ Paradise” dispenses with the form of short story entirely and is instead made up of snippets of short prose. All in all, it is the text’s unknowability that likely contributes to its status as something only appreciated through abstraction. It may just be that the collection shares with its namesake its ability to inspire a bit of insanity in the reader.
