Foreshadowing the Suicide Machines of Futurama and the Racquel Welch in Animal Skins and Other Weird Stuff

By Tony Fonseca

Chambers, Robert W. The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W. Chambers. Call of Cthulhu Fiction series. Ed. S. T. Joshi. Oakland, CA Chaosium, 2004. 643 p.

01/05/2005

Almost every horror fan has heard the names Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft, but sadly, very few have read Robert W. Chambers, despite the fact that his very first work in the horror genre, The King in Yellow (1895), has to be one of the most intriguing dark fantasy collections ever published. Unfortunately, Chambers' imaginative dark fiction after The King in Yellow was never able to live up to the expectations he established for himself. His follow-up collection, The Maker of Moons, did have its flashes of brilliance, but it marked the beginning of Chambers' developing a reputation of placing the appeal to popularity over literary artistry. Much of Chambers' voluminous output after these two collections can be considered no more than hack writing. Fortunately, the selections in The Yellow Sign and Other Stories exclude the worst of Chambers' oeuvre, which makes the volume an excellent introduction to the early fantasist.

Certainly with a writer as productive as Chambers, an editor has to make some tough decisions as to what should be included in a collection. Some reviewers have lamented Joshi's excluding The Slayer of Souls (1920) and The Hidden Children (1914). However, as the point of the collection is to anthologize Chambers' short fiction, these longer works would be antithetical and would make the collection unwieldy, unless of course it were multi-volume. How much these exclusions weaken the overall effect of re-introducing Chambers to the reading public is difficult to say. But I think it safe to assume that any text purporting to be an introduction to Chambers' work in the horror and dark fantasy genres should rightfully concentrate on The King in Yellow and The Maker of Moons, as Joshi has done.

This is because The King in Yellow is a one of kind find, and because it remains the apex of Chambers work. Playing off naming in tales written by Ambrose Bierce, Chambers creates what one could term "the Carcosa Mythos." At the center of this mythos is a fictional text (much like Lovecraft's Necronomicon, some say the precursor to it), a play entitled The King in Yellow and a mysterious figure called The Yellow Sign, the former being so diabolical that simply having the misfortune to read its second act causes people to lose their minds. Indeed, the main characters in the first four tales either have read the dreaded act of the play and have lost their souls, or will read it before tale's end. The idea sounds fascinating, and although its execution is not flawless, Chambers does do the idea justice. It is interesting to note here that even today The King in Yellow is influencing other literature, as in Director Dan Watt's recent stage adaptation of the fictional play (The Gloucester Citizen, July 18, 2003, Features Section: Arts, P. 34).

In his introduction, Joshi posits that both Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe were Chambers' main influences, and certainly readers will find many similarities with these two mainstays of American letters, as well as with Hawthorne in the more symbolic stories. Others suggest that the tone The King in Yellow shows the influenced of the decadent fin de siecle French writers of weird fiction. The first tale, the futuristic (set in 1920) "The Repairer of Reputations," has to be one of the "best and most grotesque" delusional first person stories of paranoia, outdistancing even Poe's master works. Mr. Wilde, an absolute troll of a man who has been further disfigured by a hellish pet cat, is certainly one of the most remarkable and memorable characters in all of weird fiction:

he came and sat down beside me, peering up into my face with his little light-colored eyes. Half a dozen new scratches covered his nose and cheeks, and the silver wires which supported his artificial ears had become displaced. I thought I had never seen him so hideously fascinating. He had no ears. The artificial ones, which now stood out at an angle from the fine wire, were his one weakness. They were made of wax and painted a shell pink, but the rest of his face was yellow. He might better have revelled (sic) in the luxury some artificial fingers for his left hand, which was absolutely fingerless . He was small, scarcely higher than a child of ten, but his arms were magnificently developed, and his thighs were as thick as any athlete's. Still, the most remarkable thing about Mr. Wilde was that a man of his marvelous intelligence and knowledge should have such a head. It was flat and pointed, like the heads of many of those unfortunates whom people imprison in asylums for the weak-minded. Many called him insane but I knew him to be as sane as I was.

The tale itself is narrated by Hildred Castaigne, who reports having been thrown by a horse and receiving a head injury. After being confined to an asylum (while claiming to be sane), he meets the eccentric and evil Mr. Wilde, who runs a business whereby he helps people to "repair" their soiled reputations through revenge.

Though not as perfect as "The Repairer of Reputations," the other tales in The King in Yellow have their moments, as in The Yellow Sign, wherein an artist is haunted by dreams of a mysterious hearse and its loathsome driver, who he sees every time he looks at the steps of the church outside his apartment window. Ultimately, he receives the enigmatic Yellow Sign, which is indeed a sign that he does not have long to live. In "In the Court of the Dragon," the narrator is stalked through the narrow streets of Paris by an emissary of the Yellow King who also seems to be his doppelganger. My personal favorite is "The Mask," which is more of a dark fantasy tale than a horror story. In it, an artist discovers a mixture that calcifies live beings on contact, and he proves it by dipping animals and flowers into it, thereby making perfect marble statues. Of course, having such a fountain in one's house is a recipe for disaster, but Chambers takes the tale in an unexpected direction to make a statement about love and friendship.

The pieces from The King in Yellow are followed by two tales from The Maker of Moons (1896): the title novella, which many critics call Chambers' last truly great story, and "A Pleasant Evening," a story of a vow that causes its maker to return from the dead. Then follow six supernatural stories from The Mystery of Choice (1897). The next two books, included in their entirety, are In Search of the Unknown (1904), and Police!!! (1915). Here a zoologist collects odd or mythical creatures, while avoiding entanglements with diverse members of the opposite sex, including scantily-clad newly discovered cave women. Joshi rounds out the volume with an excerpt from The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906) and The Tree of Heaven (1907).

Chambers, like Bierce, is one of those American literary pioneers who in the early to mid 1890s created the fiction of gothic skepticism, writing about dystopias rather than perfect societies. Though lesser known, Chambers is often just as skeptical as Bierce, for through the use of dark fantasy, he was able to contradict the national narratives of progressivism. Certainly, The King in Yellow and The Maker of Moons will give readers a good sense of Chambers' cynicism, usually tinged with demented humor, at work. But for readers who wish to not only experience Chambers' forays into the realms of horror and dark fantasy, but also get a full understanding of one writer's growth from the weird, to the humorous, and then to the romantic, this compendium of his short works is a step in the right direction. If nothing else, considering the scarcity of some of the tales reprinted here, this collection should at least raise a few inquisitive eyebrows of readers who think they've seen and read it all.

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The Ballad of the King in Yellow 

Contributed by G. Caliban Fournier

The black stars of Carcosa stay;

They haunt me even now

I know the King in Yellow

And the Sign upon his brow

His Pallid Mask corrupts my dreams

And threatens to reveal

The tatters of his robe still flap

On secrets they conceal