INTRODUCTION

Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933) is the very embodiment of the cult writer. Although in his day he was an immensely popular author of historical and romance novels, he is today remembered for a handful of books he wrote early in his career—books that powerfully fuse mystery, supernatural horror, and psychological aberration into a uniquely unnerving amalgam. The pinnacle of his achievement in this realm is The King in Yellow (1895), a title that has covertly inspired generations of horror writers, beginning with H. P. Lovecraft. The recent revelation that Nic Pizzolatto, creator of the television show True Detective, has been inspired by Chambers, Lovecraft, and other weird writers has given Chambers a mini-boom—just about the last thing its author would have expected for work that he appeared to repudiate after he had capitulated to the Sirens’ song of bestsellerdom.

Of the life of Robert William Chambers we know surprisingly little. Born in Brooklyn on May 26, 1865, he entered the Art Students’ League around the age of twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow-student. From 1886 to 1893 he studied art in Paris, at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. Returning to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue (“the three most frivolous and ephemeral publications of any commercial standing that New York has ever known,” as John Curtis Underwood termed them¹); but for reasons still not entirely clear he turned to writing and produced his first “novel,” In the Quarter (1894), really a series of loosely connected character sketches of artist life in Paris. C. C. Baldwin suggested that Chambers was inspired “to make use of his Latin Quarter experiences”² by Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème (1851; the novel upon which Puccini’s opera La Bohème is based), and this may be right; although there is no way to ascertain whether it was so specific a literary influence as this. That Chambers was not, in any case, sincerely interested in capturing his own experiences is testified by the fact that he completely dropped the “Gallic studio atmosphere” after The Mystery of Choice (1897), presumably because it no longer proved popular. With The King in Yellow, Chambers’s career as a writer was established—not because he had felt himself a born writer but because that collection of short stories was (probably in spite rather than because of the weird tales contained in it) successful. Chambers had somehow caught the public eye; he knew what the public wanted and gave it to them.

Although from time to time he returned to weird fiction, Chambers never did so with the gripping and almost nightmarish intensity of The King in Yellow. Instead, he wrote an endless succession of novels and tales that, while superficially dealing with a wide range of topics—the Franco-Prussian War; the American Revolution; modern New York society; World War I; the Civil War—all contained an unending procession of pretentious and dim-witted fellows (usually of independent means and attemptedly cynical temperament) falling in love at the least provocation with an equally endless parade of simpering and virtuous women who, although capable of blushing instantly at the slightest suggestion of impropriety, nevertheless give themselves body and soul to their male pursuers after what proves to be a merely token resistance. Some passages in Chambers’s works would probably have been considered salacious at the time of their writing, and the only fitting modern parallels are Harlequin romances. It is doubtful whether any of Chambers’s work would serve even as raw material for historical or sociological analysis of the period, since even in his own day he was castigated for producing wooden and unrealistic characters; of his females in particular Frederic Taber Cooper remarked: “They are all of them what men like to think women to be, rather than the actual women themselves.”³ It is not, then, surprising that nearly the whole of Chambers’s output—of which I have counted eighty-seven different volumes, including novels, short story collections, one volume of poems, one drama, juvenile books on nature, and even an opera libretto—has lapsed into obscurity.

There is not much to tell of Chambers’s later life. At least two of his novels reached official best seller status—The Fighting Chance (1906) and The Younger Set (1907), both selling some 200,000 copies—and Chambers settled into a luxurious and elegantly furnished mansion in Broadalbin, in upstate New York. Like Lord Dunsany, Chambers liked the “great outdoors” and was an ardent hunter and fisherman. He collected butterflies, Oriental rugs and vases, and—if the photograph of his study printed in Rupert Hughes’s laudatory sketch of Chambers in Cosmopolitan is any guide—he was in no small way a bibliophile. He died, presumably in comfort and peace, on December 16, 1933.

Of the pleasantness of Chambers’s character there seems no doubt: Hughes unhesitatingly said that “Bob Chambers is the salt of the earth,”⁴ and Joyce Kilmer’s interview with him in 1917 reveals him to be genial, completely lacking in the arrogance of success, and even fairly perceptive about writing and writers; his concluding advice to the would-be author—“Let him not take himself too seriously!”—is surely a reference to himself.⁵ It is, however, ironic that Chambers’s very popularity drove each of his works into obscurity as its successor emerged; and so early as 1927 August Derleth complained in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft that even The King in Yellow—the most widely reprinted of his works both during and after his lifetime—was becoming difficult of access.⁶

Chambers’s fantastic writing is limited principally to five volumes—The King in Yellow (1895), The Mystery of Choice (1897), In Search of the Unknown (1904), Police!!! (1915), and the novel The Slayer of Souls (1920)—while several ancillary volumes contain weird matter in lesser degrees—The Maker of Moons (1896), The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906), and The Tree of Heaven (1907). This wide scattering of his fantastic writing shows that Chambers never considered himself a writer of weird fiction in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce (although he was influenced by both), but seems to have written such work whenever the mood struck him. It is, of course, to be noted that three of the eight works listed date to Chambers’s very early period; and future generations of readers have confirmed C. C. Baldwin’s remark on Chambers’s output: “Had I my choice I’d take the first three or four [of his books] and let the rest go hang.”⁷

One phase of the inspiration for The King in Yellow—a collection of short stories of which only the first six are fantastic, and of these the first four are loosely interrelated—is sufficiently obvious. Chambers must have read Ambrose Bierce’s collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)—or the English edition of 1892, In the Midst of Life—shortly after his return to America from France, for he adopts certain cryptic allusions and names coined in some of Bierce’s tales and appropriates them for his own.⁸ The focus of these first four tales in The King in Yellow is a mysterious drama (apparently in two acts) called The King in Yellow, which incites a peculiar fear and desperation upon reading. Chambers has, however, willfully altered the components he derived from Bierce, and it is in any case not clear whether the Bierce influence really extends beyond these borrowed names. Bierce indeed created Carcosa, which he describes in “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” as some great city of the distant past. Chambers maintains this notion, but in Bierce Hali was simply a prophet who is “quoted” for the epigraphs of the tales “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” and “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (1891). Finally, Chambers borrows the term “Hastur” from Bierce; but whereas Bierce envisioned Hastur as a god of the shepherds (see “Haïta the Shepherd”), Chambers regards Hastur alternately as a place or as a person.⁹ (It is to be noted that Lovecraft, when mentioning such things as Carcosa, the Lake of Hali, and the like in his own tales, was consciously following Chambers, although he knew full well the Biercian origin of these terms. His one mention of Hastur in “The Whisperer in Darkness” is entirely inconclusive, and it cannot be determined what he meant by this term.)

From the first four stories in The King in Yellow we learn a few more details about the contents of Chambers’s mythical play: there are at least three characters, Cassilda, Camilla, and the King in Yellow himself; aside from places such as Hastur and the Lake of Hali, we learn of regions called Demhe, Yhtill, and Alar; finally, there are other details such as the Pallid Mask and the Yellow Sign. It is obvious that Chambers intended to leave these citations vague and unexplained; he wished merely to provide dark hints as to the possible worlds of horror and awe to which his mythical book was a guide. Although in “The Silent Land” (in The Maker of Moons) Chambers twice makes mention of a “King in Carcosa,” he never develops this “King in Yellow mythology” elsewhere.

The tales in The King in Yellow differ widely in tone, flavor, and quality. The first, “The Repairer of Reputations,” is a bizarre tale of the future (its setting is New York in 1920) in which Chambers, aside from oddly predicting a general European war, imagines a quasi-utopia with euthanasia chambers for those who wish to slough off the burden of existence, while Chicago and New York rise “white and imperial” in a new age of architecture wherein the “horrors” of Victorian design are repudiated. Nevertheless, the tale cannot be called science fiction (on which see further below), since the futuristic setting does not in the end have any role in the story line, which concerns a demented young man who imagines that he is the King in Yellow and that his cousin is vying for the throne. Such a bald description cannot begin to convey the otherworldly, nightmarish quality of the tale, where the unexplained elements of Chambers’s “King in Yellow mythology,” along with a prose style bordering upon the extravagant and an intentionally chaotic exposition, create an atmosphere of chilling horror. “The Mask,” in contrast, is an exquisitely beautiful tale set in France concerning a sculptor who has discovered a fluid capable of petrifying any plant or animal such that it resembles the finest marble. Several portions of the narration, especially toward the end, are pure poetry.

“The Yellow Sign” is generally considered to be the best tale in The King in Yellow, and deals horrifyingly with the nameless fate of an artist who has found the Yellow Sign. The story presents an unforgettable image of the loathsome hearse-driver who is a harbinger for the narrator’s death—a soft, pudgy, wormlike creature who has one of his fingers torn off in a tussle and who, when found in the artist’s studio at the end, is pronounced to have been dead for months. “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” in spite of its inclusion of Hastur as a minor character, is not part of the “King in Yellow mythology,” but is another hauntingly beautiful tale about a man who is supernaturally transplanted into the medieval age while hunting in the Breton countryside and falls in love with a lovely huntress three centuries dead.

The rest of The King in Yellow contains a series of fine prose-poems (“The Prophet’s Paradise”) followed by two gripping tales dealing with the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), in which France suffered a humiliating military defeat at the hands of Prussia. Both of these stories, “The Street of the Four Winds” and “The Street of the First Shell,” keenly etch the suffering and privation that the citizens of Paris endured during the siege of Paris (September 19, 1870–January 28, 1871), which culminated in Prussia’s victory. The last two stories in the book must take place at a slightly later date. “The Street of Our Lady of the Fields” is a somewhat long-winded but touching tale of romance that is probably meant to take place in the early 1890s, if the citation of various French painters is any guide; the female protagonist, Valentine, expresses reluctance to engage in a romance with a naïve American man, Hastings—perhaps because she is a prostitute or what used to be called a woman of “easy virtue.” “Rue Barrée” takes place a few years earlier (the painter Gustave Boulanger, who died in 1888, is a minor character), and is again a not ineffective tale of romance. These stories, however, seem to foreshadow Chambers’s later career as a writer of “shopgirl romances” (a term that designates the books’ popularity with young female salesclerks and other members of the urban working class).

The Mystery of Choice (1897) is an undeservedly forgotten collection, and—in its more refined and controlled prose style, greater unity of theme, and exquisite pathos—ranks close to The King in Yellow in quality. The first five stories are linked by a common setting—Brittany—and some recurring characters; and although the first (“The Purple Emperor”) is an amusing parody on the detective story, the rest of the collection contains fine tales of fantasy and even science fiction. In In Search of the Unknown (1904) Chambers begins to take another tack—the mingling of weirdness, humor, and romance—and readers must judge for themselves how felicitous this union is. His conceptions are as fertile as ever (we are here concerned with a series of tales depicting successive searches for lost species of animals, including a loathsome half-man and half-amphibian called “the harbor master,” a group of invisible creatures apparently in the shape of beautiful women, and the like), but in every tale the narrator attempts to flirt with a pretty girl, only to lose her at the last moment to some rival. A sequel to this volume is Police!!! (1915), a collection of tales where further searches are made for lost species—including mammoths in the glaciers of Canada, a group of “cave-ladies” in the Everglades, and the like. This book places still greater emphasis on humor than its predecessor, and several of the tales are quite amusing; but there also seems to be a slight decline in Chambers’s fertility of invention: the amphibian man in “The Third Eye” too closely resembles the harbor-master, while in “Un Peu d’Amour” we encounter an irascible character obviously reminiscent of a similar character in the first segment of In Search of the Unknown. But even here there are some gripping moments: “Un Peu d’Amour” presents some horrifying glimpses of a gigantic worm burrowing beneath the fields of upstate New York, while another tale (“The Ladies of the Lake”) discloses a school of huge minnows the size of Pullman cars.

With The Slayer of Souls (1920), however, Chambers reaches the nadir of his career. Even if we could swallow the appallingly tasteless premise—that “Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times”¹⁰ the descendants of the devil-worshipping Yezidi sect of inner Asia, which is poisoning the minds of misguided leftists and labor unionists for the overthrow of good and the establishment of evil (whatever that means)—there is no escaping the tedium of the whole work, which is concerned with the efforts of the U.S. Secret Service, along with a young woman who, although having lived for years with these evil Chinese, has now defected and converted to Christianity, to hunt down the eight leading figures of the sect and exterminate them. This happens with mechanical regularity, and it is no surprise that civilization is saved in the end for God-fearing Americans. The novel—an elaboration of the title story of The Maker of Moons (1896), although that tale is handled far better and contains some delicate moments of shimmering fantasy—is further crippled by a ponderous and entirely humourless style, and with characters so moronic that they cannot reconcile themselves to the supernatural even after repeated exposure to it. And the crowning absurdity is that the origin of all these evils is a “black planet… not a hundred miles”¹¹ from the earth! There is not a single redeeming element in this novel.

Chambers’s influence on subsequent weird writing is significant. Several leading weird writers of the next generation—Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, A. Merritt—professed to have been impressed with his work (especially—and almost exclusively—The King in Yellow), but in Lovecraft’s case at any rate the influence does not seem to extend much beyond the borrowing of names from Chambers’s “King in Yellow mythology”; the general “cosmic” attitude of both Lovecraft and Smith was clearly established before they ever encountered its dim adumbration in Chambers. Indeed, there are some anomalies in Chambers’s influence on Lovecraft. In the latter’s short novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath there are cryptic references to a “high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over his face.”¹² This would seem to be an unmistakable allusion to the Pallid Mask; but we know that Lovecraft completed his novel on January 22, 1927, but did not read The King in Yellow until March 1927. It is a remarkable case of literary parallelism. Lovecraft went on to state whimiscally that Chambers was inspired to create The King in Yellow by the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred—a volume of occult lore that Lovecraft himself had invented.¹³

Lovecraft was, indeed, central to the revival of Chambers’s reputation as a weird writer. Lovecraft devoted several pages to The King in Yellow in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), and the wide dissemination of that essay led many readers to seek out Chambers’s phantom volume. It was reprinted in paperback in the 1960s, and many subsequent editions have followed.¹⁴ Chambers’s work also inspired a host of writers, from James Blish to Karl Edward Wagner, who sought to duplicate the cryptic allusiveness of The King in Yellow. The contemporary writer Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., has developed a veritable obsession with this book: he has written poignant short stories based on it, such as “Carl Lee & Cassilda,” which transfers the characters of Chambers’s imaginary play into a gritty, hard-boiled realm of crime and perversion. Pulver has also compiled an anthology of original stories based on Chambers’s work, A Season in Carcosa (2012), with scintillating contributions by such contemporary writers as Joel Lane, Simon Strantzas, Ann K. Schwader, Richard Gavin, Gemma Files, Laird Barron, and John Langan.

How long the recent “Chambers boom” will last is anyone’s guess; but the fact remains that Chambers has attained permanent status as a minor but distinctive writer of weird fiction whose work resonates through the decades chiefly because he exercised artistic restraint in his conceptions and in particular to his allusions to the “King in Yellow mythology.” It is precisely because Chambers deliberately failed to define what he meant by such terms as Carcosa, Hastur, and Cassilda that these terms have developed an almost talismanic power to inspire fear, wonder, and terror in today’s readers, who can imagine scenarios far more chilling than any author could ever put on paper. The wide range of Chambers’s weird work—from clutching horror to ethereal beauty—indicates that he was a master of tone, atmosphere, and prose rhythm; and it is these qualities that will allow his work to last well into the new millennium.

S. T. Joshi is the world’s leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft and the author and editor of more than 200 books, including The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has written extensively on H. L. Mencken and other writers, and he compiled Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs (2011) for the Library of America. He lives in Seattle, Washington.