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3.42 AVERAGE
3.42 AVERAGE
I'm so bad at reading short stories every time I finish one I feel like the book is over and I have to take a break. I finished this the day it was due back to the library
I would have given this 4 stars, but the 2nd half of the book seems to drastically change in tone and theme, having nothing to do with the King in Yellow the previous stories do.
The stories about the yellow king were excellent, I just wasn't expecting the others and didn't really enjoy them.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
3.5 stars. An intresting collection of short stories that I'm glad I gave a try. While I had my usual struggle as I almost always have with short stories, I did find it an intresting read.
How can a book so interesting and creepy in the first half turn into something so plodding and boring in the second?
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
I arrived here like others. Perhaps I had more foresight. True Detective pushed me here with its whispers of Carcosa. Chambers' name was thrown around with the likes of Lovecraft and the early pulp writers, the dabblers of the weird. So I peeked behind the curtain to see, to heed the rumors and the whimsy. Nothing. Or rather, far little. The King in Yellow and any and all references to the Carcosa or some other grandiose realm are few, fleeting and poor. Chambers' attempts are weak, his writing bland, but mostly serviceable. There is nothing exceptional here. The bulk of the material is set in Paris and has to do with artists and loves lost or gained and then lost again. The mysteries are vague and lack any narrative compulsion or detail. Overall, the myth is greater than the man. This and its pedigree it doesn't deserve, are best left to quiet sleep.
Really like 4.5 stars... I really did not expect to like this collection as much as I did. If, like many others, I had not been forewarned that only the first four stories reference the eponymous “king in yellow”, I possibly would not have; but as it was my main take away was at the charmingness of robert w chambers’ prose and dialogue. I was expecting the plodding, ponderous but usually (or at least occasionally) rewarding prose of someone like Lovecraft or William Hope Hodgson, instead to be reminded of ‘The Sun Also Rises’ Hemingway, or Ronald Firbank’s ‘Caprice’ (an obscure book I read for obscure reasons). As others have mentioned the first story, The Yellow Sign, and the first story of “bohemian” cycle (‘The Street of the First Shell’) are stand outs but I also loved the last story, the penultimate story, & ‘The Mask’... The only part I’m not sure what to make of or how to take is ‘The Prophets Paradise’, although it’s still kind of “fun”, or interesting, that that’s in there. The structure of the collection is intriguing.
In reference to the edition I read (Heathen Edition) I found the footnotes to seemingly oddly chosen, somewhat desultory and capricious (which is not necessarily entirely negative). The faint “chapter ends on [X] page” on the bottom of the pages (inspired by kindles and e-readers they say in the introduction) is fantastic... however they didn’t actually do it with chapters! An entire short story is not a chapter! (Although I’ve heard Poe averred all short stories MUST be read in one sitting, Poe lived before Internet Induced Attention Deficit Disorder)
In reference to the edition I read (Heathen Edition) I found the footnotes to seemingly oddly chosen, somewhat desultory and capricious (which is not necessarily entirely negative). The faint “chapter ends on [X] page” on the bottom of the pages (inspired by kindles and e-readers they say in the introduction) is fantastic... however they didn’t actually do it with chapters! An entire short story is not a chapter! (Although I’ve heard Poe averred all short stories MUST be read in one sitting, Poe lived before Internet Induced Attention Deficit Disorder)