These stories induce dread and paranoia. They scare and leave you shaking. What a strange, wonderful collection. Inspired Lovecraft, I believe. What else do you need?

Led here by the first season of True Detective, I began this with much anticipation but unfortunately the collection which founds The King in Yellow mythos wasn't as impressive as I had hoped. Its use of madness and the incomprehensible might point to something Lovecraftian in scale/atmosphere, but there just was not enough material to enable the reader to sample even a bit of the sinister enormity of what its characters confronted and lost themselves to. The title story takes its name from a book mentioned in the story, and this book makes an appearance in a few other stories as well, but not enough is said about it that would convince the reader that the book is truly as horrific an object as the characters know it is. The King in Yellow is touted as art par excellence, its very perfection/sophistication capable of driving its readers insane, but there are frustratingly few glimpses of the actual text, and where they appear they are rather unenchanting. To even call it a mythos may be misleading; this is at best a collection of 'strange stories': encounters with the horrifically incomprehensible, twists in time, moments where logic and reality are suspended without adequate explanation. Chambers' writing has a drowsy romance reminiscent of early horror writers fresh out of the Victorian period, but this haunting poetry partners oddly with his seeming obsession with war and political machinery in France and a fictional (?) United States. True Detective's adaptation is elusive but far more direct in its potency. Chambers can be deftly skilled as a storyteller - the "d'Ys" story was melancholy and very moving - but if these stories are meant to be 'horror' stories, or treated as a collection with a coherent thread of ideas, then they don't fully live up to their promises.