The King in Yellow

Robert William Chambers

Jan 1902 · Harper & Bros.

Ratings and reviews

This is a very uneven collection. At his best, Chambers is creepy, engaging, and great fun. At his worst, he is cloying, tedious, and deeply irritating. He probably misses more often than he hits, unfortunately. That said, it is generally easy enough to tell within the first few paragraphs whether you've stumbled into something that will be entertaining or unreadable. Unlike so many genre writers, especially of his era, Chambers adopts novel practices like allowing his female characters to speak and behave in fairly lifelike ways. He even pokes fun at his narrators' snobbery from time to time and his prose, even at its worst, is significantly better than some other venerated writers of weird fiction.

The first five stories are decent and The Yellow Sign and Demoiselle D'ys I really thoroughly enjoyed, but the rest were too long, too boring. They are exquisitely written though, but just not my cup of tea. It's interesting to see how it all plays out and how some stories, though not explicitly, link back to The King in Yellow. I wish it could have been better but I'm still glad I read it. (Though the last two stories I have to confess I skimmed through. Sorry. :()

I enjoyed the short stories, especially those included in the King in Yellow series. There is an underlying horror of the King in Yellow, a story that is not actually repeated in Chambers' shorts. Instead we live through the affects of the book in question by its readers. How the book came into these people's possessions and how it affected them individually was intriguing. Not only that, but the lifestyles represented here were quite different than today's. Romantic and horrific.