The King in Yellow

Robert W. Chambers's 1895 collection begins with four loosely linked tales of weird horror. Each circles a fictional play, "The King in Yellow", whose second act drives its readers to madness. The Yellow Sign and the entity Hastur recur through these opening stories.

The setting moves between Paris and a near-future New York. One story follows a man with delusions of royal destiny. Another has an artist and his model haunted by a watchman in a churchyard. In a third, a sculptor's solution for making marble upends a love triangle.

The horror thins as the book goes on. A time-slip romance comes next, followed by several stories of American bohemian artists in Paris. These are romantic in mood, not frightening.

Readers who expect dread from first page to last should know the book changes register partway through. Its first half is where the play's menace gathers, and the later stories leave it behind. Carcosa, Hastur and the Yellow Sign were later borrowed by H. P. Lovecraft and by much weird fiction after him.