(preorder—shipping in May/June)
Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Jeremy Hush.
Annotated by S. T. Joshi
Published by Chiroptera Press.
Robert W. Chambers’s short story collection The King in Yellow (1895) has become a classic of weird fiction. It was praised by H. P. Lovecraft as a book that “achives notable heights of cosmic fear.” Its first several stories are interconnected narratives featuring recurring characters as well as a hideous play entitled The King in Yellow that induces madness in anyone who reads it. Such figures from that play as Cassilda, Camilla, and especially the King in Yellow himself have gone on to inspire dozens of writers to write stories inspired by Chambers’s conception—which he himself derived in part from Ambrose Bierce.
Included in the volume are such memorable tales as “The Repairer of Reputations,” which depicts a nightmare future of euthanasia chambers and a man who battles the King in Yellow for rulership of the world; “The Mask,” an exquisitely beautiful story of a woman turned into marble; “The Yellow Sign,” a towering work of gruesomeness and morbidity; and “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” in which a man drifts insensibly into the medieval past.
After a mesmerizing series of prose poems, “The Prophet’s Paradise,” The King in Yellow concludes with several memorable tales of the Franco-Prussian War of 187-71, in which Chambers—who studied art in Paris before writing his book—chronicles the grimness of war and the struggles of civilians to survive in its midst.
Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933) later became a bestselling author of historical and romance novels; but his reputation today rests largely on The King in Yellow, a work that, like its titular play, may itself induce madness and terror in those who read it.
S. T. Joshi is a widely published author, editor, and scholar. Among his books are The Weird Tale(1990), I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft(2010), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). He has prepared scholarly editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and numerous other writers in the weird tradition.
Specs:
- 6" x 9"
- 264 pages
- Smyth-sewn binding
- Head and tail bands
- Ribbon marker
- Clothbound with dust jacket
- Gold foil stamping over black cloth
- Gold gilded edges
- Newly commissioned art by Jeremy Hush
- Offset printed on archival acid-free paper
- authors_list:
- Robert W. Chambers
- artists_list:
- Jeremy Hush.
- badge:
- preorder
- book_type:
- Collection
- book_length:
- 264 pages
