An 1895 collection of fantastic short stories is enjoying a resurgence thanks to the hit new HBO series True Detective.
Although considered something of a classic by genre fans, The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers is hardly a household name – or at least it wasn't until the dark crime series starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, which premiered in the UK on Sky Atlantic on Saturday, began to drop subtle hints about the book's involvement in the TV narrative.
The series opener showed detectives Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Harrelson), investigating the ritualised murder of a young woman, Dora Lange, in 1995 Louisiana, as well as their older selves being interviewed by police investigating what appears to be a similar killing in 2012. There weren't many clues in that first episode, save for a reference to "the king" during a prison cell interview, but subsequent instalments already aired in the States offer much stronger links.
The diary of the first murder victim is examined in episode two and quotes whole chunks of The King in Yellow. How it fits into the overarching story is already the subject of much internet debate. But what is The King in Yellow anyway?
As well as being the title of Chambers' book, The King in Yellow is also the name of a fictional play which is referred to throughout the 10 short stories that make up the volume. The stories are best described as "weird fiction" – very readable and with a surprisingly contemporary voice considering their Victorian origins, along with a dreamlike fin de siècle quality. Not all of the stories are built around the King in Yellow, but it casts a long, otherworldly shadow over the book.
Chambers sprinkles around quotes from his made-up play as occasional epigraphs, but only from Act I – and with good reason. According to the lore of the interconnected stories, The King in Yellow is a cursed text that lures readers in with a fairly normal first act … and then drives them insane with Act II.
Perhaps the best story in the collection is the first one, The Repairer of Reputations. It is set in a then-future America of 1920, thriving after a (prescient) war with Germany. This future features government-approved lethal chambers for those who want to end it all. The narrator, Castaigne, reads the text of The King in Yellow and falls in with a man named Wilde, who takes fees from the desperate to "repair their reputations". Wilde might be building a revolutionary army of these fallen men, or it might be a delusion brought on by Castaigne reading the play. Castaigne says:
"I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet."
Born in Brooklyn in 1865, Chambers wrote widely, his oeuvre encompassing romantic fiction and adventure novels. But it is The King in Yellow for which he is remembered, and which places him alongside the likes of Ambrose Bierce and HP Lovecraft in the "weird fiction" pantheon. Indeed, the fabled city of Carcosa, over which Chambers' King in Yellow rules, was borrowed from an 1891 Bierce short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa". Chambers also used Bierce's supernatural entities Hali and Hastur, which later found their way into Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories.
The King in Yellow has been referenced by Neil Gaiman, in his short story "I, Cthulhu", and in the comics writer Grant Morrison's millennial magnum opus The Invisibles. But it is True Detective which has ignited the most fresh interest in Chambers' book. The free Kindle version of the book on Amazon has been galloping up the charts since the series aired, and the UK publisher Gollancz rushed out a 99p ebook last week, packaging The King in Yellow together with Ambrose Bierce's original short and an encyclopedia entry on Chambers.
Quite how The King in Yellow relates to the ritual murder of Dora Lange in True Detectives remains to be seen – though one would guess that The Yellow King referred to in the series is the perpetrator of the murders. There are, of course, plenty of theories. The author Michael M Hughes, writing (in a spoilery post for those who haven't seen beyond episode one) at Io9.com, suggests: "I'll go out on a limb and say the season will continue with detectives Cohle and Hart edging closer to the abyss of what Lovecraft termed 'cosmic fear'."
Vanity Fair also has a heap of theories as to the meaning of True Detective's Yellow King, and posits a five-strong secret society responsible for the ritual killings, among many other (again spoilery) ideas. MTV plaintively wails: "Who the hell is the Yellow King?" but feels confident in suggesting that it's "highly unlikely that there is anything supernatural about him".
I haven't seen enough to have any proper theories of my own yet, other than to say: can it be coincidence that the horrific killing investigated by Cohle and Hart in 1995 took place exactly a century after the publication of Robert W Chambers' book?
