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A review by a_monkey
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
3.0
It is hard to know what to say of a book whose first few chapters are perfect weird horror and then the remaining slightly more than half is just entirely boring and pointless.
I kept reading thinking that surely the titular cursed text, perhaps the finest example of the Motif of Harmful Suggestion you could hope for in a story, would return or continue to exert its influence in some way. But it doesn’t! People just wander around Paris eating dinner and going fishing and shooting the shit! The further you go, the less plot there is, characters you’ve never heard of wandering aimlessly about for dozens of pages after the story has ended!
Apparently some editions just include the first four stories, which seems like cheating, but damn if I can work out why the rest of the book is there. But again, the first few chapters really are just perfect weird horror!
I kept reading thinking that surely the titular cursed text, perhaps the finest example of the Motif of Harmful Suggestion you could hope for in a story, would return or continue to exert its influence in some way. But it doesn’t! People just wander around Paris eating dinner and going fishing and shooting the shit! The further you go, the less plot there is, characters you’ve never heard of wandering aimlessly about for dozens of pages after the story has ended!
Apparently some editions just include the first four stories, which seems like cheating, but damn if I can work out why the rest of the book is there. But again, the first few chapters really are just perfect weird horror!