Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow is regarded as a classic of horror writing. But on the whole, I was less than impressed. The first section has some quite good horror: “The Repairer of Reputations”, “The Mask,” “In the Court of the Dragon,” and “The Yellow Sign.” Even “The Demoiselle d’Ys” is lighter in tone but still spooky writing. “The Prophets’ Paradise” is a bit of creepy poetry that may be intended as a section of the in-story play The King In Yellow.
Chambers’s skill as a prose stylist is evident. The stories are often structured to give information out of order, such that the reader is forced to piece things together as he goes along. This adds to the sense of surreality that the characters are often experiencing as well.
Unfortunately, having written a series of genuinely spooky stories that brings the setting from the U.S. to Paris, Chambers bogs down. He surely had spent quite a bit of time in the city and enjoyed his time there. He seems to intimately know both the layout of the streets, and the cultural relations between the native Parisians and American expats. But while there are eerie notes, places of drunken or stunned disorientation (Perhaps a ghost army in “The Street of the First Shell”?) these are mostly stories about young bohemian artists gallivanting about town. I don’t know anything about Chambers himself, but the reader gets the impression he may have loved Paris almost too much to write about it well. While he’s perfectly happy to empasize the cruel and grotesque in America, his seems not to have the heart to do the same for Paris. Even the suffering, as in “The Street of the First Shell” is romanticized.
Unless there is some subtext that I missed, or which doesn’t translate readily to 21st century readers, none of the latter half comes back around to tie into the first half’s tales of horror. It feels as though Chambers could have broken this into two collections, each more coherent on its own.