Journal · The King in Yellow

The King in Yellow: the play no one should read

At the center of Robert W. Chambers's book of 1895 is a play that doesn't exist. Its first act seems harmless; the harm, we're told, lies in the second. Chambers's great trick is how little of it he shows: never more than a few lines, never the plot, never the shape of the Yellow Sign. Here is everything the text actually gives us.

What we know about the play

It is a play known to its readers as a book, with a first act and a second, and it has a history. In "The Repairer of Reputations" we hear that it has been denounced from press and pulpit, that governments have tried to stop it, and that it has spread all the same. Its characters include Cassilda, Camilla and a figure called the Stranger.

The longest scene Chambers lets us overhear

The epigraph to "The Mask", given as coming from Act I, Scene 2:

CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

That is all. A masked gathering, a guest asked to show his face, and terror at the discovery that the face he shows is no mask. We never learn who the Stranger is.

Carcosa, Hali and the Hyades

"Cassilda's Song", printed at the front of the book, gives the play its setting:

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Carcosa is the play's city, or its country: a place of twin suns and cloud waves where black stars rise and strange moons circle through the skies. The lake has a name elsewhere in the stories: the Lake of Hali. The Hyades are a real cluster of stars in Taurus; in the play's world they are something more, presences that sing. The King himself is only glimpsed, in his tatters.

Hastur, the slipperiest name

In "The Repairer of Reputations" Hastur belongs to the play's strange geography, spoken of alongside Aldebaran and the Hyades. In "The Demoiselle d'Ys", which has nothing to do with the play, Hastur is simply a man's name, one of a lady's falconers. Chambers seems to have enjoyed letting a word change its meaning from story to story, the way things shift in a dream.

And the Yellow Sign?

In the story named for it, a night-watchman mutters a question: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?" It is never explained in plain words. We are not told what it looks like. Part of the pleasure of the book is fitting the fragments together, knowing they will never quite fit.

Where the names came from, and where they went

Chambers didn't invent every name. Carcosa, Hali and Hastur come from Ambrose Bierce's tales of 1886 and 1891. And the book didn't fade: in 1927 H. P. Lovecraft singled it out in his long essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, saying it "really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear", and later borrowed Hastur, the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign for a list of dread names in one of his own stories.

Read it with a guide

Our edition prints the complete first edition of 1895, all ten stories, checked word for word against three copies of that printing. A guide to the play gathers what the four linked tales let slip and says plainly where Chambers goes silent. A note before each story lays out the scene without giving away an ending; the who's who has over 70 entries and the glossary over 200 terms, from the play's names to Chambers's French, studio slang, falconry and the 1870–71 siege of Paris. Read it slowly, trust the narrators a little less than they would like, and let the gaps stay gaps.