Name: The King in Yellow
Price: 30.03 RON
Availability: InStock
Author: Robert W. Chambers
ISBN: 9781840226447

The King in Yellow

Robert W. Chambers

The King in Yellow, a book of short stories by American writer "Robert W. Chambers." The book is named after a fictional play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed weird stories, and the book is described by S.T. Joshias a classic in the field of the supernatural. There are ten stories, the first four of which mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it.

The first four stories are macabre in tone, centering, in keeping with the other tales, on characters that are often artists or decadents. The first and fourth stories are set in an imagined future 1920s America, whereas the second and third stories are set in Paris. These stories are haunted by the theme: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?"

The weird and macabre character gradually fades away during the remaining stories, and the last three are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers' later work. They are all linked to the preceding stories by their Parisian setting and artistic protagonists.

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Notă biografică

Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) is a minor figure in the American literary canon proper - he spent most of his long career writing popular romance and adventure fiction that sold well but is now largely forgotten - yet he holds an outsized and well-documented place in the history of weird and horror fiction on the strength of a single early book. The King in Yellow (1895), a linked story collection built around a fictional, forbidden play that drives its readers mad, directly influenced H. P. Lovecraft, who borrowed Chambers's invented god Hastur and the symbol of the Yellow Sign into his own mythos, and through that lineage Chambers's imagery has traveled far beyond what his own later career would suggest. The inclusion case here is not about representation but about a genre canon habitually underweighted on general-fiction shelves: cosmic horror and weird fiction trace a direct, documentable line from Poe through Chambers to Lovecraft and onward, and that lineage is incomplete without its middle link. Chambers is also a case study in how a writer can be simultaneously canonical to a genre and near-invisible to the literary mainstream - worth noting for any collection trying to represent horror's history rather than only its most famous names. Contemporary readers reliably rediscover The King in Yellow through pop culture: the HBO series True Detective (2014) named-checked its Carcosa and the Yellow Sign directly, sending a new generation of readers back to the 1895 source, and the book still unsettles on its own terms - atmospheric, fragmentary, more interested in dread than explanation. This Clearview Editions large-print printing - 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, ragged-right, no word-division - lets low-vision and aging horror readers follow that thread back to its origin without strain.