ROBERT CHAMBERS wrote The King in Yellow in 1895, with ...

A collection of two batches of loosely connected short stories, it is one of the most puzzling books ever produced. Though he went on to write best-selling historical romances (which I haven't read and, judging from most comments, wouldn't want to), Chambers never again produced anything close to its quality. Despite making money at fiction and writing extensively on hunting, he remains an enigma.

"The King in Yellow" of the title is a play the very language of which can drive the reader mad. Here (and later), Chambers was a major influence on H.P. Lovecraft, but he did not waste his time, as Lovecraft did, on mucus-slathered adjectives. The horror comes from character, superbly rendered detail?Chambers studied as a painter?and an uncanny ability to suggest rather than declaim. Most likely, he also spurred the fearsome drama in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

Every story of The King in Yellow has something riveting about it, though in many of them the disparate parts are never fully explored or connected. Only the first four actually mention "the king in yellow," and only obliquely, which makes it all the more astonishing that, so perfectly realized, they became the model for much of 20th-century horror/fantasy.

It's hard to pinpoint what Chambers was up to, and this may be his greatest strength. "The Mask" and "The Yellow Sign" deal most directly with the virulent effects of reading "The King in Yellow," but it's "The Repairer of Reputations"?the first story in the collection, though probably not the first written?that cements his reputation.

I don't know anything quite like it. As Ignatius Donnelly does, Chambers envisions a future utopian NY (here, 1920) which includes sanctioned euthanasia. But where Donnelly dwells on the minutia of the suicide parlors' decor, Chambers instead names those at the opening ceremonies, quotes from their fatuous speeches and later offhandedly mentions lone agonizers dashing into the building. This approach nails the alternate universe in place simply as background for a tale of unfolding mania and madness. Such routine acceptance makes the fantasy immediate and palpable. "The Repairer of Reputations" is one of the finest stories in the English language.

The second major group of stories, each named for a Parisian street, ignores the "yellow king" theme and concentrates on the Parisian art-student world of the Latin Quarter. Of these, "The Street of the First Shell" is a harrowing war tale?not one wit less so for being set, again, in an alternate universe, this time a Paris under siege from Germans in an unnerving presentiment of World War I. Jack Trent's haphazard stumble into a battle where no one knows the object or even the location brings us closer to war than most of us will ever want to get. The other three tales in this group are love stories that often veer out of control and reach no particular end, but they still scintillate with mesmerizing detail.

Between the two major sections lies "The Prophet's Paradise," a Gertrude Steinish (though pre-Gertrude Stein) bit of cumulative repetition, and "The Demoiselle d'Ys," a displaced-time story with descriptions of a desolate moor that might humble Thomas Hardy. Altogether, The King in Yellow should be required reading for anyone who wants to examine the possibilities of the English language.

You can download the Chambers text, but beware?it's been scanned but not carefully proofed, leaving many small but annoying errors. The manuscript is available online at [www.litrix.com/kyellow/kyell001.htm](http://%3CFONT%20FACE=%22Akzidenz%20Grotesk%20BE%22%20SIZE=1%3E%3Cfont%20face=%22Arial,%20Helvetica,%20sans-serif%22%20size=%223%22%3Ewww.litrix.com/kyellow/kyell001.htm).