Introduction To The Mythos

The Yellow Mythos is a loosely-linked continuity that has come to define the imagined universe revolving around "The King In Yellow", a mysterious fictional play that supposedly can send its readers insane or open a gateway for supernatural events. The core work is a real book of the same title, The King In Yellow, a late-nineteenth century short-story collection by Robert W. Chambers featuring an opening handful of tales in which the bulk of the Mythos' recurring characters, places, ideas and tone are rooted, plus an equal handful of seemingly unconnected tales. The scant seeds sown in those early stories have grown into an enduring, though relatively unknown, fictional mythology in the subsequent hundred years, where quiet horror can meet twisted romance, terrible gods from an alien dimension spin their unknowable schemes via the minds of mortals, and authors from all manner of backgrounds have pushed the settings and characters into all sorts of interesting and different directions.

The King In Yellow – the book, the play, and something else entirely...

The actual contents of the play are almost entirely unrecorded by Robert Chambers' stories, though some of the fiction deals with the fates of those who are ensnared by reading it. Those characters familiar with it, however, largely agree that it possesses a supreme artistry, insight and truth, but at the same time it manages – in some unexplained fashion – to be supremely horrific, madness-inducing and corrupting. This would seem to lie, by some nebulous association, with an ill-understood, unearthly and hideously powerful entity of the same name, the eponymous King in Yellow himself. His, or its, ominous near-presence haunts the characters within the play and also the characters within the stories to whom the play is merely a work of art: a scarcely comprehendable malice, implacable ambition and insidious taint bleeding through from one layer of reality to another, although without ever definitely manifesting in 'person'. The different tales have little overtly to do with one another and only hint at the spectral tragedy contained in the background to events; just a few tiny fragments of the plot of the play are glimpsed, together with a small assortment of other clues that may be combed from Chambers' text. The scant references his characters make to anything in or related to the play are most often brief, vague and context-free – so these cannot necessarily even be placed in clear relationships with each other, and furthermore the same names may seem to be applied variously to people, places, concepts, things or a combination thereof, hence it is sometimes even open to question which of these categories such names belong in.

The central aspects of the Mythos are notable, in fact, for their nebulousness: concrete knowledge or sane description of happenings is most often elusive to the protagonist characters, and hence equally to the reader; Chambers sketches his creation so lightly, suggests the nature of events so opaquely, as to require the imagination to fill in almost every detail. The stories that form the canon rely instead on a queasy, shadowy horror and the threat of a barely-understood doom for much of their effect. This makes for a fictional universe that is wide open to interpretation and consequently has been used, borrowed and played with in greatly differing manners by different authors over the years since.

Common to the bulk of interpretations, however, is that the play is set amid the dying days of a corrupt and decadent dynasty of a distant world, where a masked ball at court sees the disastrous arrival of a Stranger who wears (or is) the 'Pallid Mask', probably an emissary or avatar of the King in Yellow. Other frequently occurring motifs include the peculiar, compelling Yellow Sign, the Hyades star cluster in the constellation of Taurus, and the ancient, other-worldly dread city of Carcosa under its "black stars", where "the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen" as its "twin suns sink into the lake of Hali". The nature of the setting varies, depending on story and writer, and upon whether a given fiction is concerned with the murky world inside the play or with a version of the 'real world' into which the malign influence of the King spreads its tendrils; even within a single piece the tone can shift through a genre-melting blend of horror, suspense, science-fiction and even romance. The fact that most of the core concepts are barely hinted at in the original narratives, though, allows for almost limitless bending of the base ideas into new shapes of an author's choosing.

Where did it come from?

Chambers himself drew certain ideas from a couple of earlier short stories by Ambrose Bierce, and it is probable that several other precursor texts fed into The King In Yellow. His stories were heavily influenced by his years as an art student in Paris, and are frequently characterised by the presence of artists, aesthetes and those generally of emotional and susceptible states of mind, into which the worm of the play's malice can burrow. In those uncertain days of the 1890s, the fin de siècle movement was particularly associated with certain late 19th-century Parisian artistic circles; this air of both the closing and onset of an era, the twin excitement and despair anticipating the impending changes of a new century, where degeneration and decadence are as likely as great deeds, have likely filtered through into his writing. Notably, the colour yellow was strongly associated with decadence at this point – this can create a dissociation in the mind of the modern reader, who might expect it to mean sunshine and hope, but it is its alternative connotations of sickness and decay that are at play here: as noted above, this mood is commonly evoked when piecing together the setting of the apocryphal play. Meanwhile, the spirit of fin de siècle, its cultural boredom, cynicism and pessimism, is also encapsulated in The King In Yellow's first (and perhaps most essential) story The Repairer of Reputations, especially in its narrator-protagonist Hildred Castaigne but also in its deadpan vision of the then-future 1920s in America.

Many other writers have since drawn inspiration from Chambers in turn, notably famed 'cosmic horror' author H.P. Lovecraft – who adopted a similar style in his writing of only darkly hinting at the ancient eldritch entities or alien gods lurking in the depths of reality, and borrowed a selection of names from The King In Yellow to drop into his own tales. This has spawned the Hastur Mythos, which lifts its name from 'The Repairer of Reputations' – a name which also crops up in other contexts in further stories in the collection, and derives ultimately from Ambrose Bierce – and bolts the Yellow Mythos onto Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos by making the King into an avatar of this Hastur, therein one of the Great Old Ones. Some writers and readers prefer this version of the continuity, while others choose to ignore it and concentrate on those aspects of the mythology native to Chambers' (and perhaps Bierce's) writings, what might be called the Carcosa Mythos.

Finding out about the Mythos

If you are not familiar with the Mythos, it is recommended that you visit this wiki's page on The King In Yellow (disambiguation) in order to clarify the various things that the titular term can refer to – book, play, character etc. – in reality and fiction. For example, the fictional play does not actually exist (although there have been reconstructions inspired by the hints dropped by Chambers), but in entries on this site it and things associated with it may be described as if they are real. By paying a little attention to what is being discussed, it should be quite easy to discern what is real and what is fiction – in particular, if in doubt, check the Category tags at the bottom of the page.

The Mythos is not a cohesive entity – although many themes recur frequently and all the stories are inspired to some extent by Chambers' work, they often disagree upon the details. Although not all, many of the stories overlap with the wider Cthulhu Mythos – there is some disagreement about whether this link is a good thing or not! See also Mythos (Definition).

A reader new to the Mythos should sample Chambers' book to gain an insight into where it (primarily) all began – but, even if his writing is not for you, that is not a reason to give up on the entire Mythos if the hints in it appeal since there are many other stories, of many different types, to sample.

The stories of Bierce and Chambers can be found in several formats, the best and cheapest option (in the UK at least) being the editions released by Wordsworth Editions and available from good bookshops or from Amazon.co.uk for £2.99 or less; the same edition of The King In Yellow can be found in the US via Amazon.com for $7.99. As its age means it is out of copyright, the book's full contents can also be found in several places online.

For further reading, The Hastur Cycle has some key stories (although it also wanders into largely-unrelated territory for half the volume) and Rehearsals for Oblivion (Act I) has a fine variety of stories and poems related to the Mythos. Both are available from Amazon, although the former is only available second-hand. In addition, the King In Yellow Anthology by Atlantean Publishing has a wealth of fiction, poetry and conjecture, if you don't mind small press publications.

For more information on the Mythos, a good place to start is the pages listed under the Lexicon category below, which detail a few key concepts.

See also Truth and the Mythos.