The King in Yellow

/ Alex Good

The King in Yellow

The King in Yellow is a book by Robert W. Chambers first published in 1895 that is nearly as mysterious as the sinister work it takes its name from. It’s a collection of short stories, the first four of which are linked and have some connection to a fictional play, The King in Yellow, which has the effect of driving anyone who reads it crazy. In this graphic adaptation by I. N. J. Culbard it’s these first four stories – “The Repairer of Reputations,” “The Mask,” “The Yellow Sign,” and “In the Court of the Dragon” – that are represented.

I say it’s a mysterious book because despite being in the public domain and freely available on the Internet I don’t think it’s that widely read except by people interested in its influence on H. P. Lovecraft. But even Lovecraft had reservations about how good it was. As a side note of some interest, on the copyright page to this book we’re told that it’s an “Original story by H. P. Lovecraft / Adapted and Illustrated by I. N. J. Culbard.” That gives you some idea of how much cultural cachet Chambers has lost to his successor.

I don’t think much of Chambers’s book. To be honest, I never made it all the way through. So I was happy to come across this comic crib, which struck me as playing fair with the source material while having a vision of its own that nicely complements Chambers while making a fair job of stitching together the different stories. I liked the presentation of the pale, ghoulish figures who represent the King’s servants in our dimension, and could get behind the decision to switch from a first-person narrative. It’s a good comic, but at the end of it all I didn’t feel I had any greater understanding of what was going on and I still can’t say I think the original is a work of the first rank.

Graphicalex

18 thoughts on “The King in Yellow”

    • So, let me mansplain some stuff to you and Alex….

      ~cracks knuckles

      The King in Yellow was it own little thing that was written and then never enlarged upon by its author, Chambers. It languished until Lovecraft read it, and he stole it and made the King in Yellow one of the elder gods in his Cthulhu Mythos and called him by a different name (possibly Hastur?). That still wasn’t enough because Lovecraft was a failure in his own time.

      Fast forward some years.

      Suddenly, dead Lovecraft and his stories are popular. Everyone loves that cosmic horror stuff. Scads of stuff is written, people investigate and they find that this Hastur thingy is based on something called the King in Yellow. Some brave people set out to write the King in Yellow in its own universe, like it was originally intended. They valiantly try and partially succeed, but the connection to Lovecraft and Cthulhu is too strong and the KiY remains attached to the Cthuhlu Mythos as an appendage instead of its own thing.

      I hope that helps 😉

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  3. I tend to agree that the original KiY isn’t as good as some of the follow up stuff. But the ideas presented give a huge world to play in and that is why I went down the KiY road fully and only partially down the Cthulhu road.

    Was this a paper copy?

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