Underworld Amusements has produced this limited edition of The King In Yellow to coincide with the Things That Go Bump in the Night gallery exhibition at Gallery Provocateur in Chicago, IL.
The cover art was painted for this annual show by G. Edwin Taylor.
Copies will only be available from Oct. 29th, 2011, to January 31st, 2012.
Now Out of Print
The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories written by Robert W. Chambers and published in 1895. The stories could be categorized as early horror fiction or Victorian Gothic fiction, but the work also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, science fiction and romance. The first four stories in the collection involve an imaginary two-act play of the same title.
The first four stories are loosely connected by three main devices:
A play in book form entitled The King in Yellow
A mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity known as The King in Yellow
An eerie symbol called The Yellow Sign
These stories are macabre in tone, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents. The first story, “The Repairer of Reputations”, is set in an imagined future 1920s America.
The other stories in the book do not follow the macabre theme of the first four, and most are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers’ later work. Some are linked to the preceding stories by their Parisian setting and artistic protagonists.
Taylor’s pulpy, low-brow art is perfect for this obscure classic of weird horror. Chambers represents a sort of literary bridge between Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.
H.P. Lovecraft read The King in Yellow in early 1927 and included passing references to various things and places from the book—such as the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign—in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931), one of his seminal Cthulhu Mythos stories. Lovecraft borrowed Chambers’ method of only vaguely referring to supernatural events, entities, and places, thereby allowing his readers to imagine the horror for themselves. The imaginary play The King in Yellow effectively became another piece of occult literature in the Cthulhu Mythos alongside the Necronomicon and others.
