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cremullins 's review for:
The King in Yellow
by Robert W. Chambers
As other reviewers have said, this book starts very strong with some of the finest weird horror ever written, and ends with some fairly forgettable romance stories that, to a modern reader, come off as padding more than anything.
It's possible that to a contemporary reader the opposite was true, but Chambers' reputation, for better or worse, hangs over this work. It's quite telling that nobody ever talks about "Rue Barrée" in the context of their Delta Green campaign or True Detective.
Then again, this seems like one of those books many people profess to have read, but to those who have read it, it is blindingly obvious that they haven't. We actually learn little about the King in Yellow from the stories in this book, and we get only glimpses of the play featuring him. But that helps the effect. The imagination fills in the gaps.
For people coming to this from Lovecraft or Delta Green, the first four to six stories are absolutely essential reading, while the rest are not really essential and can be skipped without missing much. Only completionists should seek to read every last story in the book. But those first few stories remain as effective as the day they were published and are must-reads for anyone who is even tangentially into weird fiction. That said, "The Street of the First Shell" is a pretty intense war romance and worth reading, in my opinion.
It's possible that to a contemporary reader the opposite was true, but Chambers' reputation, for better or worse, hangs over this work. It's quite telling that nobody ever talks about "Rue Barrée" in the context of their Delta Green campaign or True Detective.
Then again, this seems like one of those books many people profess to have read, but to those who have read it, it is blindingly obvious that they haven't. We actually learn little about the King in Yellow from the stories in this book, and we get only glimpses of the play featuring him. But that helps the effect. The imagination fills in the gaps.
For people coming to this from Lovecraft or Delta Green, the first four to six stories are absolutely essential reading, while the rest are not really essential and can be skipped without missing much. Only completionists should seek to read every last story in the book. But those first few stories remain as effective as the day they were published and are must-reads for anyone who is even tangentially into weird fiction. That said, "The Street of the First Shell" is a pretty intense war romance and worth reading, in my opinion.