Tag Archives: robert w. chambers

True Detective Season 1: Weird Fiction, The Yellow King, and Cosmic Dread

Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, which had a profound impact on True Detective season 1, was a strange book even for its time. While ostensibly a collection of short stories, it is in fact a hidden narrative of psychosis and madness. There (somewhere) in the text is the story of The King in Yellow and a play that drives anybody who reads it mad.

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The King in Yellow: Exploring Robert W. Chambers’ Masterpiece

I discovered The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895) as if I were a character in a H. P. Lovecraft story. Imagine that I had just heard about the Necronomicon and strolled into a library. There, on the front desk was The King in Yellow. A little peculiar? Yet, I wasn’t sure if it was a tongue-in-cheek nod to books of cosmic terror or not. Certainly, it felt as though this book was mentioned in passing in some biographies and snaps of author biographies. Still, I never seemed to be able to find a clear answer as to what this book was about….

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