Artifact of Doom: Any copy of the play The King in Yellow.

That's what the colour yellow means (see the yellow book in The Picture of Dorian Gray).

Anthropomorphic Personification: The Yellow King may personify decadence itself.

All First-Person Narrators Write Like Novelists: Taken to a rather odd extreme when it turns out that the narrator of The Yellow Sign has been fatally wounded and is writing his account as he is dying.

Alien Sky: Carcosa-black stars, twin suns, you name it.

Also don't confuse with Yul Brynner, the King in Yellowface-though the real Thai monarchy, including Brynner's Historical Domain Character King Mongkut, is associated with the color yellow. You might be looking for the Raymond Chandler short story of the same name (in which the lead refers to this book), or for the Dead Milkmen album of the same name. In addition, the stories are the basis for The Yellow King Tabletop RPG by Robin Laws. A particularly notable version was written by James Blish for the story 'More Light'. Several authors have crafted facsimiles of the 'real' text of Chambers' fictional play, including playwright Thom Ryng's 1999 version, which premiered at the Capitol Theater in Olympia WA and has seen two printings from Armitage press. According to Lovecraft's friend and fellow writer August Derleth, the actual performance of The King in Yellow is a summoning ritual for an Eldritch Abomination.

Lovecraft cited this book as an influence, and it's the direct source of Hastur's name note Chambers himself got it from a short story by Ambrose Bierce, 'Haïta the Shepherd', in which it's just a shepherd's god. A common thread is a fictional play also called The King in Yellow, the reading of which either drives people mad or leads them to a dark fate.ĭue to the publishing date, it's in the public domain in most countries and readable online. The stories are scattered all over the map between horror and romance, but all generally have ties to France as a setting, the later ones moving more and more into romance and increasingly starring artists. The King in Yellow is a rather surreal collection of short stories by Robert W. From Cassilda's Song in The King in Yellow, Act i, Scene 2

The king in yellow stories