The stories describe Act I as quite ordinary, but reading Act II drives the reader mad with the 'irresistible' revealed truths. Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!Īll of the excerpts come from Act I.

Stranger: Indeed? Cassilda: Indeed, it's time. The short story The Mask is introduced by an excerpt from Act I, Scene 2d:Ĭamilla: You, sir, should unmask. Song of my soul, my voice is dead Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Songs that the Hyades shall sing, Where flap the tatters of the King, Must die unheard inĭim Carcosa. Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is For example, 'Cassilda's Song' comes from Act I, Scene 2 of the play:Īlong the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink beneath the lake, The shadows lengthen Chambers' story collection excerpts sections from the play to introduce the book as a whole, or individual stories. The fictional play The King in Yellow has two acts, and at least three characters: Cassilda, Camilla, and the King in Yellow. Some are linked to the preceding stories by their Parisian setting and artistic protagonists. The other stories in the book do not follow the macabre theme of the first four, and most are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers' later work. The next two are set in Paris, while the fourth, 'The Yellow Sign', is again set in New York. The first story, 'The Repairer of Reputations ', is set in an imagined future 1920s New York City, whose history, being at odds with the knowledge of the reader, adds to the effect of its unreliable narrator.

These stories are macabre in tone, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents. For instance, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's famous short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper', involving a bedridden woman's descent into madness, was published shortly before Chambers' book. It has also been suggested that the color yellow represents quarantine - an allusion to decay, disease, and specifically mental illness. The color yellow signifies the decadent and aesthetic attitudes that were fashionable at the turn of the 19th century, typified by such publications as The Yellow Book, a literary journal associated with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. An eerie symbol called the Yellow Sign.A mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity known as The King in Yellow (or Hastur).A play in book form entitled The King in Yellow.The first four stories are loosely connected by three main devices:

The king in yellow by robert w chambers