Robert William Chambers

The King in Yellow Robert William Chambers

Robert W. Chambers published The King in Yellow in 1895 as a collection of supernatural tales that interrelated and connected to each other through an interesting conceit that prefigured the rise of postmodernism by a good half century or more. The connective tissue tying the stories together is the alleged existence of a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. That volume is considered to hold such great and dreadful power that anyone who dares read it set down upon a path toward insanity. The composition of this unusual work was undertaken by Chambers following a trip to Paris as an art student in which he immersed himself in the horrific imagery of Bohemian and Decade art movements. The result is a book that contains ten self-contained short stories and a fictional play also titled "The King in Yellow" from which excerpts are introduced throughout the stories.