King in Yellow, The

The cursed play that drives its readers mad — the 1895 collection that gave weird fiction Carcosa, the Yellow Sign, and the King himself. Four supernatural stories, linked by a book nobody in them has read past the first act. A man in an alternative 1920 New York believes he is heir to an American throne. A sculptor discovers a substance that turns living tissue to marble. A churchgoer is pursued by an organist with cold eyes. A painter buys a strange amulet by accident, and the watchman from the churchyard comes through his studio door. H. P. Lovecraft named Chambers an influence and folded Hastur and the Yellow King into his own mythos. A century later the first season of True Detective built its mythology directly on this book and sent hundreds of thousands of readers back to a collection most had never heard of. What survives is the absent centre: Chambers never lets you glimpse the play itself, only fragments of verse and the testimony of those it destroyed. That device — the unreadable book at the heart of a work of fiction — runs from here through Borges and Lovecraft to House of Leaves. This recording includes all four supernatural stories and the six Paris tales that followed them, plus a new critical introduction by Alexander Kross placed after the fiction so it spoils nothing.