The King in Yellow

By: Robert W. Chambers

Narrated by: Guy Barnes

The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1895. The book is named after a 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 has been described by critics as a classic in the field of the supernatural. There are ten stories, the first four of which ("The Repairer of Reputations", "The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon", and "The Yellow Sign") mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it.

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Critic reviews

"This collection of stories has influenced writers from H.P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, to Robert Heinlein, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and George R. R. Martin. The King in Yellow and his legendary city of Carcosa may be the most famous character and setting you've never heard of." (Michael M. Hughes, Gizmodo)

Disjointed stories

I thought this book would mainly be about Hastur, but it was mostly just weird relationship stories followed up by boring relationship stories. If it wasn't called "The King in Yellow" and it was more like, "Relationship stories from around the early 1900s" I would probably have given it a better review, but since it's not called that, it's hard to give it a good review. Also the narrator's voice is very jarring when he does female voices, but I think maybe that's because the female characters are all very flat and derivative maidens in distress. Maybe at the time it was written, this flighty woman character was desirable but it didn't age well. The only reason I didn't give it 1 star was because some of the descriptive imagery of the locations was nice to envision an era most people have completely forgotten, and the narrator does sound like when he's not doing female characters, he's a pretty decent narrator.