But with the year, the writing bug struck him. He had originally written it in Munich in 1887. In 1895 Chambers published a remarkable collection of ten eerie short stories, The King in Yellow. It appeared during a period when a lot of people unlikely to writer horror stories did so. The King in Yellow is the most striking of all collected horror story works in that the title refers to a fiction play which becomes in integral part of a number of stories which are otherwise unrelated.
Horrific tragedy strikes all who remain sane after reading it.
The middle two tales are a classic ghost story and a poetic, mystical trifle. The last four tales harken back to Chambers's first novel, revoleing around the Paris student art scene but all involve some small, eerie twist. 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. And the collection has been recognized for its value. Unlike the aforementioned works of contemporary authors, The King in Yellow has often reprinted and anthologized to the present day.