num_pages: 192
description: "Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, 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 Du Maurier's Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is The Yellow Sign, in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's." -- From the Introduction by H.P. Lovecraft.
language: English
title: The King in Yellow
titlecomplete: The King in Yellow
characters: Braith, Hastings, Raoul, Jack Trent, George West, Richard Osborne Elliot, Bowles, Madame Tarotte, Hastur, Mr Bladen, Foxhall Clifford, Sylvia, Gaston, Valentine Tissot, Philip, Jeanne D'Ys, Glemarec Renè, Susie Byng, Severn, Piriou Louis, Hartman, Selby
genres: Fiction, Weird Fiction, Short Stories, Gothic, Mystery, Horror, Classics, 19th Century, Fantasy, Lovecraftian
ratings_count: 17421
series: The King in Yellow
publisher: Wildside Press