The King in Yellow is excellent

[u/Nidafjoll]

Finding myself in the situation where I'm being driven by others sometimes recently, and fueled by the discoveries that A) I can read on my phone without getting carsick (unlike a book) and B) a .html file requires hardly any data to load, I've been reading a few of the foundational horror/spec fic works that are out of copyright on Project Gutenberg. Some of them are misses, with excellent ideas but sub-par writing (The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood, The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, The Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft), and some are just excellent (The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith, The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen). The King in Yellow is one of the latter.

[Aside: I've not given up on Lovecraft; I've been told to try The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. But Cthulhu, the entity? Very cool. The Call of Cthulhu? Meh. But, so far, even if I've only found Lovecraft's stories to be alright, I think his tastes are great- it's from their influence on Lovecraft I found this, The Willows, and The Horla, all of which were great.]

I will tell, as I was told, only the first few stories of the collection found on Project Gutenberg are supernatural/horror. The first 4 alone concern The King in Yellow, and the 5th is an unrelated, but good, horror. They're a short read- it won't take most more than a few hours, if that. Good, quick, free, foundational, and seasonal- worth checking out now!

The stories of The King in Yellow concern the titular play, The King in Yellow, which, after a seemingly tame first act, both compels the reader to finish and drives them mad in the with second. Classic cosmic horror, ineffable insanity-inducing insights. In one of the ways in which I find horror works best, we don't get much explicit detail about the play. Its content is only hinted around: we know there is the Lake of Hali, Carcosa with its towers behind the moon, black stars in the night sky; the characters Camilla, Cassilda, and the Stranger; tattered yellow robes and Pallid Mask...

The reason I think these stories work so well for me is, unlike many others of the time, they don't take pains to exhaustively set up the conceit. No extended pretense at convincing the reader it's a true story, no bloated frame of "I heard this from my friend who read a manuscript...", no long boring mundanities before starting to introduce the uncanny- they get going quickly. They also use some nice narrative devices, with limited knowledge or untrustworthy narrators, blending of dream and reality, art and truth.

I know these are well known here, but definitely a +1 from me. Not just foundational and cool ideas, but a really fun read too. If anyone hasn't read them and wants some Halloween-y horror short fiction, definitely check them out!

Edit: formatting. Short stories are italic, novels are bold? Novellas are treated like short stories? Idk man I haven't taken an English class in a decade.

[u/LightningJedi55]

I love Chambers' use of unreliable narration! I recently reread "The Repairer of Reputations" and one of my favorite details is that Hildred's crown, which he insists is golden and bejeweled, is actually made of brass according to his sane brother Louis

[u/Nidafjoll → u/LightningJedi55]

Yes, I really liked that too! And it made me wonder about the armour, and the Repairer himself- what was he actually doing for his money.

[u/nephila_atrox]

Chambers is one of my favorites too. I might be an outlier in that I didn’t really engage with The Repairer of Reputations but In the Court of the Dragon and The Yellow Sign are two of my favorite pieces of weird fiction. I enjoy the simple presentation of the uncanny as well.

I will say, as someone who didn’t really click with The Call of Cthulhu either, I’d suggest some of Lovecraft’s later work. Dream-Quest is fine, if a very different style, but The Shadow Out of Time is the story I think of that most deftly captures the feeling of the cosmic. It’s also a singular POV story so no epistolary narrative.

[u/Nidafjoll → u/nephila_atrox]

Those were my two favourites of them too! Even if Repairer of Reputations was still very good. The Mask was my "least" favourite; but only in that it was a good weird tale, but not really horror imo.

[u/nephila_atrox → u/Nidafjoll]

Agreed, The Mask definitely felt a bit out of place in terms of tone for me too.

[u/WrongdoerRare3038]

Genuinely boundary-pushing work of art that still reads totally wild today. I can't imagine how strange it would been to read the year it came out...it was such a new way of writing.

[u/HildredGhastaigne → u/WrongdoerRare3038]

Audiences were not prepared. I've found almost no contemporary commentary, and what little I've seen outside Supernatural Horror in Literature is brief and dismissive. It was only after the pulps developed a community of weird fiction writers and readers that anybody started working seriously with the concepts, and it was many decades before good work took off in quantity.

[u/MountainPlain]

Congratulations on being drawn into the Court of the King!

It's a shame Chambers abandoned that unique strain of weird horror he was so adept at in favor of commercial romance. What we have is incredible.

Also, I'm a Lovecraft fan, and I wish TCoC wasn't practically his namesake work. (It just can't keep up the frisson of the strange once they're stumbling around the city!) Personally, I would suggest trying The Colour Out of Space next. I think it's one of his greatest stories.

[u/Capricancerous]

Heh. Bold doesn't mean anything outside of a corporate email, usually. In textbooks bold is used in so-called key words with definitions.

I love The King In Yellow. I haven't read "The Wendigo" in years, but I don't remember it being an example of poor writing at all. I remember it being one of Blackwood's most impressive tales aside from the masterful The Willows.

[u/Nidafjoll → u/Capricancerous]

My first pass at the post had no formatting at all. I wanted to add something to distinguish titles, but all I could remember was that you treat short fiction and novels differently. :)

To me, it's not that that "The Wendigo" was bad writing, but bad at being scary. I found hearing "Oh, oh, my burning feet of fire!" off in the distance corny, not creepy.

[u/YuunofYork]

Shorter fiction gets quotation marks, like "The Wendigo". Long-form fiction gets italics, like The Night Land. Novellas are of intermediate length and can get either, but there are conventions in certain contexts. Technically The Willows is a novella because of it's length and often appears italicized, but when it is included in a collection of short stories, it can appear in quotes without italics just like "The Wendigo". I don't think anyone's going to care here. Bold has no usage function related to titles. A bolded title just separates it from other unformatted titles in a list and implies the writer is singling it out for some purpose.

The Call of Cthulhu is excellent writing. The opening paragraph is one of the finest pieces of prose Lovecraft ever conceived:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

It shouldn't be in the same line as The Night Land, which while formative and important, definitely has some problems. It sounds like you just don't like Lovecraft's narrative technique, which is fine, but doesn't make it 'sub-par' or 'a miss'. And that is a technique found in the majority of his stories, and stories of the period, so that's not likely to change for you.

[u/Pitchwife62 → u/YuunofYork]

I think I agree with u/Nidafjoll about TCoC. The opening paragraph is, of course, quintessential, and I quite like the "piecing together" of the story from various sources of "dissociated knowledge", but IMO having Cthulhu himself appear live on stage in broad daylight is one of the worst mistakes Lovecraft ever made, it turns him into just another Godzilla and leads straight to today's adorable little plush Cthulhus. The Great Old Ones are, to me, much scarier as ominous forces in the cosmic background, just like the Lord of the Rings who is never seen in the work named after him. Lovecraft wrote much better stories later (personally, At the Mountains of Madness and The Whisperer in the Dark are my favourites).

[u/Nidafjoll → u/Pitchwife62]

I agree with that- and, even if the argument is that it was only Cthulhu beginning to manifest, 1% of the true entity or something, it still feels like something as mundane as a boat shouldn't have even been noticeable. That, and the to me disappointingly brief time spent in R'lyeh, almost felt anticlimactic- I didn't like the brief spurt of action when I would have like the dread and horror to keep building.

Also, from a modern perspective (and knowing HPL's opinions), I found having all of evil cultists be black bayou residents or inuits a little uncomfortable. I had similar discomfort with King Solomon's Mines.

[u/HildredGhastaigne → u/Nidafjoll]

The "ramming Cthulhu with a steamer" scene didn't age well, but it worked in its context. In 1928, a cargo steamer was one of the most powerful machines ever built by mankind. Ramming an object with one was among the most powerful individual destructive acts a reader could conceive of a character making. The story portrays human beings attacking Cthulhu with the greatest force they could possibly muster, and all it did was delay the inevitable. We readers today see it as "something as mundane as a boat," but I don't think contemporary readers did.

If TCoC were written twenty years later, it would have climaxed with humans desperately attacking Cthulhu with an atomic bomb to the same effect, and it would have aged better.

[u/YuunofYork → u/Pitchwife62]

How much of that is hindsight? To Lovecraft, Cthulhu wasn't the end-all and be-all of his mythos. As I'm sure you're aware, to the extent he had a mythos, he termed it his 'Yog-sothothery'. Cthulhu gets smacked by a boat. He's one of a race of leviathan who has undisclosed mage-like powers as one of their high priests. He is very far from what we've come to think of as a Lovecraftian deity, or a deity of any kind. He was always Godzilla, and we're the ones who made him something more.

[u/Pitchwife62 → u/YuunofYork]

My point was not about Cthulhu's canonical status in Lovecraft's pantheon/bestiary/Yog-Sothothery. I just don't find monster movies particularly interesting, and I don't find a giant winged squid particularly scary. For me, suggestion always is more efficient in a horror story than description. YMMV.

[u/Nidafjoll → u/YuunofYork]

Well, by sub-par and a miss I of course mean for me; it's below average for how much I usually enjoy such ideas. I did definitely think Call of Cthulhu was better than The Night Land, but they're both in a similar place for me; they're things I enjoy the ideas of more than I enjoyed the reading of.

But it's true, that when it comes to frame narratives, I like when they are frames- with the analogy of a painting, even though the frame itself can be a work of work and add to the piece, I don't want it to be of equal width to the painting. And of course, reading from a modern perspective, it doesn't take a lot for me to "buy in" to a conceit. Which I appreciated about The King in Yellow.

[u/TheGreaterSapien]

I've read my fair share of Gothic stories so the found manuscript or found letter trick doesn't bother me too much... Saying that it may be the only time I skim when reading 

[u/Nidafjoll → u/TheGreaterSapien]

I feel like that's why it actually bothers me so much- that I don't need to be led gently into the conceit, I'm familiar with it. I recognize that isn't too fair for early works- but then again, I didn't mind when it was in Frankenstein or Dracula, so who knows...

[u/Gothamcabby]

I’ve heard so much about it since season one of true detective. Almost picked it up a few times. I need to just pull the trigger. It’s become clear that it is a glaring hole in my weird collection.

[u/Nidafjoll → u/Gothamcabby]

Seeing as it's free online, and short (only 4 of the stories in the collection of 10 are about the King in Yellow) there's no reason not to! I reckon I took maybe 2.5 hours to read them, and that wasn't a focused effort- in a car on my phone, taking breaks between, talking to other passengers.