1865–1933
Robert Chambers achieved his greatest fame for popular bestsellers in the first two decades of the twentieth century—books with such titles as The Restless Sex, Some Ladies in Haste, and The Younger Set. He became one of the most successful authors of his time. He was dubbed “the Shopgirl Scheherazade,” and H. L. Mencken dismissed him as “the Boudoir Balzac.” He also wrote romantic historical novels against backdrops such as the Franco-Prussian War and the American Revolution.
But before these books, back in 1895, came a collection of stories entitled The King in Yellow. The first four stories comprise an interwoven sui generis tapestry. Later Chambers wrote a few more volumes of fantasy and supernatural horror, such as In Search of the Unknown, before turning to more profitable tales. He is remembered now, however, for The King in Yellow, in part for its clear influence on H. P. Lovecraft, who references it often in his Cthulhu Mythos cycle, and recently for its appearance as a motif in the HBO series True Detective.
A running theme in the four stories is the existence of a play with the title The King in Yellow, which seems to resemble Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” and an ancient malevolent spirit also called the King in Yellow. Now and then Chambers quotes from act 1, maintaining that the opening of the play is deceptively ordinary and harmless, but that even perusing the text of Act 2 can drive a reader mad. Out of this series of outré stories, none is more horrific than “The Yellow Sign,” with its nightmare imagery of death, decay, and living corpses.
Chambers began as a painter, and his familiarity with the medium suffuses this story. He studied at the Art Students League in New York City and was friends with Charles Dana Gibson, soon to become famous for his creation of the “Gibson girl” in advertisements and illustrations. Later Gibson illustrated many of Chambers’s society novels. Chambers spent much of his twenties in Paris, studying at the École des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian. These student experiences inspired his first novel, the anonymously published In the Quarter, which appeared in 1894. The next year came The King in Yellow.