Recently I purchased a copy of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a classic work of “weird fiction” that would inspire writers like H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for sometime, especially with the idea of a malevolent play that is so terrible and beautiful, it drives anyone who reads it mad. That play, of course, is the titular The King in Yellow, the text of which—beyond a couple of snippets—is never quoted in the book.
The book is a collection of ten stories, the first four of which share the thread of the infamous play. The rest of the book consists of stories that take place mostly in Paris, specifically the Latin Quarter, and revolves around the lives of young American art students in the City of Light. Indeed, Chambers published In the Quarter, a collection of stories about the Bohemian lives of the Latin Quarter’s residents, a year prior to the publication of The King in Yellow.
The four proper TKiY stories are quite good, and succeed as horror stories that unsettle, more than they scare. The hidden gems of this collection, however, are the Latin Quarter stories, which depict a freewheeling, fun-loving period in French history before the unhappy days of the First World War ruined France and the West forever.
Of those stories, my favorite is “The Street of the First Shell,” which takes place during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. It is a thrilling depiction of the privation and struggle of that conflict, and of the doomed Parisian defense against the Prussian siege.
The Portly Politico 