Robert Chambers

"Originally published as The King in Yellow in 1895 in New York City, New York, United States of America, by F. Tennyson Neely."

The King in Yellow

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I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face. 

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the moon. 

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”

Never in word or deed or thought while with them had I betrayed my sorrow even to myself. 

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord.

“Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty of the greave being still in existence?” I demanded. 

“Of course,” he replied coolly. Then for the first time I took a personal interest in Hawberk.

 “It was worth something to you,” I ventured. 

“No,” he replied, laughing, “my pleasure in finding it was my reward.”

A very human yearning exists in these stories, too, a longing that animates its characters and their experience of the world. The desire at work feels almost too nebulous and primal to be contained by definition, something like an instinct toward deliverance, however hazy its conception… The same longing powers these few, obtuse lines, which may be among the most uncanny and evocative we have in our literature, an almost spiritual mystery in the weight they carry: “…for I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon…” And, oh, what thoughts. And still, what shadows?

This book’s original effect on me had been entirely centered around the peculiar, haunted quality exuded by its omissions, the idea of the play. The lines Chambers provides from the imaginary work and the vague wisps of events therein resonate with the existential gravity of a particular horror—a very personal, human horror of the mind, where something essential is confirmed, that the world cannot in any way be apprehended, enlightenment is indistinguishable from derangement, and the joke is very much on you.

The idea of “magic words” has always felt misunderstood to me. The magic is not the words themselves, or any particular word, because they are, after all, empty vessels. The magic is only ever using the right words in the exact right way. The secret knowledge lies in arranging, say, the twenty-six symbols of our English alphabet into a configuration which reliably produces an intended effect upon the audience, perhaps and even especially against that audience’s wishes—configurations most commonly categorized as a story, poem, lyric, or play. Then there’s no end to the capabilities of language and its power over human beings, its ability to engender the most overwhelming emotional states. Put words to music and the entire world can move.

The King in Yellow

Highlights