“Many called [Mr. Wilde] insane, but I knew him to be as sane as I was. . . . ‘I am not mentally weak; my mind is as healthy as Mr. Wilde’s.'”
~The King in Yellow
The Yellow King has interested me of late. I find that Mr. Chambers’ titular character is quite the mystery. He resides in the unseen, and seldom makes an appearance. He is unexplained, and as the book transitions from weird tales into romance, he seems to disappear entirely.
The effect is perhaps easily done, though skill is needed to do it well. Whether or not Chambers could answer the question, “Who is the King in Yellow?” the reader feels that there is an answer.
I have no answer myself. I find his disparate appearances hard to correlate at times. In the first story, he seems a sad delusion, in the second, a fiction, in the third (I have no idea what that story is about), and in the fourth, the sort of eldritch abomination that he is commonly characterized as in other media.
Yet it doesn’t feel random or haphazard. It seems like there is some reality behind it.
Or maybe I’m being a fool:
Tale Told 