Robert W. Chambers

Robert William Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 26 May 1865. He trained as a painter, first at the Art Students League in New York and then for several years in Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian among the international art students of the Latin Quarter. Back in New York he worked as an illustrator for magazines including Life and Vogue, and then, in the early 1890s, he turned to fiction.

The King in Yellow (1895) was his second book. It is an odd one: ten stories, of which the first four are linked by a fictional play, also called The King in Yellow, that drives anyone who reads its second act toward madness or ruin. Those four stories are the ones on this site. The Repairer of Reputations is set in an imagined America of the 1920s with government “suicide chambers,” narrated by a man who may not be reliable at all. The Mask and In the Court of the Dragon take place in the Paris Chambers knew as a student. The Yellow Sign is set in a New York studio and is the most purely frightening of the four.

Chambers borrowed several names for the play’s mythology, including Carcosa and Hastur, from the stories of Ambrose Bierce, and never explained them. The vagueness is the point. We get fragments of the play, a song, a symbol, and the reader fills in the rest. H. P. Lovecraft read the book in 1927, and he and later writers folded the King in Yellow into their own shared mythology. In 2014 the HBO series True Detective sent a new generation of readers looking for it.

Chambers himself left the weird almost entirely behind. He wrote a few more supernatural books, but over the next thirty-five years he became one of the best-selling American novelists of his day, producing dozens of society romances and historical novels, many of them set in upstate New York during the Revolutionary War. Those books are now mostly forgotten. He died in New York on 16 December 1933.

Start with The Yellow Sign, then go back to the beginning of the cycle and read the four in order.