Episode 165: Tatters of the King: On Robert Chambers' 'The King in Yellow'

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2024

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When the blue starlight dies / And all is through." This short poem, an epigraph to "The Yellow Sign," arguably the most memorable tale in Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection The King in Yellow, encapsulates in four brief lines the affect that drives cosmic horror: the fearful sense of imminent annihilation. In the four stories JF and Phil discuss in this episode, this affect, which would inspire a thousand works of fiction in the twentieth century, emerges fully formed, dripping with the xanthous milk of Decadence. What’s more, it is here given a symbol, a face, and a home in the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask of the Yellow King, and the lost land of Carcosa. Come one, come all. Join JF's upcoming course on the films of Stanley Kubrick, starting March 28, 2024. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! REFERENCES Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow Weird Studies, Episode 100 on John Carpenter films Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Who Found Out” Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought Forms Weird Studies, Episode 140 on “Spirited Away” Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak Charles Taylor, A Secular Age David Bentley Hart, “Angelic Monster” M. R. James, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad” William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes, or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdst. This is Phil.
0:53.2	This week, JF and I are discussing Robert W. Chambers' short story
0:57.9	collection, The King in Yellow, first published in 1895. We're only talking about the first four
1:04.9	stories of that collection, though. The King in Yellow is a bit like Russia's album 2112, the A side of which is a single track about
1:13.0	a futuristic society that bands music, and the B side of which throws in a few unrelated songs.
1:19.6	Like 2112, The King in Yellow is half a concept album.
1:24.0	The opening quartet of stories is pulled together by the dread power of a play called The King in Yellow, while the rest of the book is made up of lighter and unrelated tales.
1:34.8	Chambers became a prolific and successful author of sentimental novels, most of them forgotten today.
1:41.1	His literary repute rests largely upon these four strange stories, written at the
1:46.4	beginning of his career. H.P. Lovecraft considered the King in Yellow a great classic of the
1:51.8	weird, and included it in his essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Lovecraft's description
1:58.1	of this book is unimprovable, so I will read it in full.
2:03.0	Quote,
2:04.1	Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the 1890s,
2:09.6	is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers,
2:14.2	since renowned for products of a very different quality.
2:18.3	The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having, as a background,
2:23.3	a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy,
2:30.3	really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear, in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the gallic studio atmosphere made popular by d'aumorier's trilby
	...

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