The King in Yellow

Description

The King in Yellow is a book by American author Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1895. It is a collection of ten short horror and supernatural stories, the first four of which are loosely connected by three things: a play called 'The King in Yellow' which induces despair or madness in those who read it, a malevolent supernatural entity known as the King in Yellow, and a mysterious symbol called the Yellow Sign. The ten stories are: The Repairer Of Reputations (a story of egotism and paranoia); The Mask (a dream story about art, love and science); In The Court Of The Dragon (a story about a creepy organist who follows a man around in order to gain his soul); The Yellow Sign (a story about a sinister churchyard watchman); The Demoiselle D'ys (a love story based around time travel); The Prophets' Paradise (a tale about a sequence of eerie poems that develop the style of a quote from the play The King in Yellow); The Street Of The Four Winds (an artist in Paris is drawn to a neighbor's room by a cat); The Street Of The First Shell (a war story); The Street Of Our Lady Of The Fields (a story about American bohemians in Paris); and, Rue Barrée (another story about American bohemians in Paris). The book and tales within it inspired H.P. Lovecraft to employ the use of only vaguely referring to his supernatural entities, and he included references to Chamber's book in one of his novels in the Cthulhu stories.

This book has 71,943 words, 129 pages in the PDF version, and was originally published in 1895.

Production notes: This ebook of The King in Yellow was published by Global Grey in 2018, and updated on the 31st January 2024. The artwork used for the cover is 'On the Moulin Rouge promenade' by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.