The King in Yellow

Shockingly little on the King in Yellow; I was expecting much more in the vein of HP Lovecraft, but it was a bargain bin version of Henry James instead. The first story was fine, the rest were the sort of pretentious male fantasies you'd expect "Frasier"'s Niles Crane to write in his personal diary. Skip everything after part 2.

Chambers uses a remarkably modern language for his time, and is occasionally as cleverly witty as, say, Pratchett, but it was the pre-Lovecraftian mad horror that drew me to this book. All the short stories involding the king in yellow are wonderfully creepy and curious -- but I was somwhat disappointed the recurring motifs of madness and the titular play are all done with after the four first stories, then it's a series of love stories from there on out. They're good love stories (this is where his dry wit shines) and I adore the bohemian settings he uses for them, but they feel dissonant to the horror stories that preceded them. Had this collection been published today I'm pretty sure any editor would at least have reshuffled the order of stories so the change didn't feel so abrupt.

That was... odd. Given that The King in Yellow is an important part of weird fiction, I should have expected that. I can't speak to how good the adaptation is as I have never read the original. I do feel like I was missing something though, throughout the piece. The connections between the stories felt tenuous, and the narrative didn't seem to hang together, even in the individual stories. Perhaps this was a cause of the graphic format. It don't really think this story was particularly suited to being portrayed in images. I feel like it probably relied heavily on prose. Well, at least I feel inspired to read the original!

I can appreciate why some people love this book and the idea of the story was very intriguing to me but I just found it difficult to read and exceptionally dull.

An enjoyable version of the King in Yellow with the same stories from the book.