Take a photo of a barcode or cover
slanderoid 's review for:
The King in Yellow: Special Edition
by Robert W. Chambers, Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft
This could have easily be one of my favorite books. Seven out of the ten short stories appeal to my love of the macabre in ways that most stories simply can't. The idea of a book called "The King in Yellow" that's about a play called "The King in Yellow" that causes people to go mad and die after a person reads it is decently terrifying on its own, but to couple it with the Lovecraftian imagery that Robert Chambers employs is icing on the rotten, maggot-infested cake.
However.
The three last stories veer away from "The King in Yellow" so dramatically that it detracts from the saga that was constructed in the first. Instead of continuing the horrifying story of the play, they topic shifts to love and romance and, even though the author seems to attempt to unify all of the pieces with the last story in the book, the effort seems weak and does not satisfy.
Perhaps there is some hidden value to the latter chapters. The first act of the play within the book is supposedly so commonplace that the revealed truths of the universe found in the second act, when juxtaposed with the normalcy of the first, are capable of driving a person mad. With the actual book, it seems to be the other way around - the first portion is so insane and the second portion so mundane that, when put together, they threaten to drive the reader mad. If this was the author's intention, kudos to him. If not, I have no idea what he was thinking and I don't care to know.
That being said, it's definitely worth a read. You can find it all over the internet for free (as it is in the public domain) and it's certainly a great value for the price.
However.
The three last stories veer away from "The King in Yellow" so dramatically that it detracts from the saga that was constructed in the first. Instead of continuing the horrifying story of the play, they topic shifts to love and romance and, even though the author seems to attempt to unify all of the pieces with the last story in the book, the effort seems weak and does not satisfy.
Perhaps there is some hidden value to the latter chapters. The first act of the play within the book is supposedly so commonplace that the revealed truths of the universe found in the second act, when juxtaposed with the normalcy of the first, are capable of driving a person mad. With the actual book, it seems to be the other way around - the first portion is so insane and the second portion so mundane that, when put together, they threaten to drive the reader mad. If this was the author's intention, kudos to him. If not, I have no idea what he was thinking and I don't care to know.
That being said, it's definitely worth a read. You can find it all over the internet for free (as it is in the public domain) and it's certainly a great value for the price.