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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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.

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.

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?

“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.”

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.

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