You know, I really thought this video was going to be about a monster?
That’s why I planned it for Halloween.
I’ve been hearing about The King in Yellow for ages, and despite all the games and books
and references it’s cropped up in, I feel like I’ve never really understood what it…
is?
It somehow feels wrong beside Cthulhu and HP Lovecraft’s other space octopus gods?
But until now, I haven’t known why…
Well, I finally went and read the book itself.
Turns out The King in Yellow isn’t really much of a monster at all.
Really, it sort of says that we are.
We writers.
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If you have no idea what any of this is, don’t worry.
You’re probably not alone.
Most people know the King in Yellow as a tentacled elder-god invented back during the pulp sci-fi
boom.
To them, it’s a distinct entity.
I guess it’s kind of become that?
But the true version of The King in Yellow… is a book of short stories, written by the
author Robert W. Chambers around the turn of the 20th century.
All the tales in the book are connected by a fictional play also called The King in Yellow,
which, in the world of the book, is known for its remarkable influence.
In the stories, the play has been censored, condemned, and banned by almost every public
organization, not because it contains anything immoral, but because it has the power to change
its readers in ways that are hard to fathom.
It has spread through the world, quote, “like an infectious disease”, to the point where
almost anyone interested in the arts has at least heard of it, if not read bits and pieces.
I wouldn’t really describe the stories in this book as scary, or even existential like
a lot of HPLovecraft’s work.
They’re just… weird.
It’s hard to say how exactly, but there’s this dissonant quality to them.
Watching how the play affects the characters and their lives somehow gives me this sense
of… repulsion?
Like my mind is trying to reject something before I even know what that something is…
And it all begins with a poem in the book’s dedication:
Along the shore the cloud waves break, // The twin suns sink behind the lake, // The shadows
lengthen // In Carcosa.
// Strange is the night where black stars rise,
// And strange moons circle through the skies // But stranger still is //Lost Carcosa.
// Songs that the Hyades shall sing, // Where
flap the tatters of the King, // Must die unheard in // Dim Carcosa.
// Song of my soul, my voice is dead; // Die
thou, unsung, as tears unshed // Shall dry and die in // Lost Carcosa.
// Cassilda's Song in "The King in Yellow," Act
i, Scene 2/ I know that must sound like a lot of beautiful
gibberish now—it certainly did to me when I first read it—but that’s part of the
intrigue.
It sets a tone of disorientation and foreboding, depicts a world we can’t quite grasp, where
suns sink behind lakes, where souls have songs which the deadened voice can no longer sing.
The impression is deep, but you can hardly articulate where it comes from.
And that confusion is important.
After this one fleeting glimpse the play, the strangeness of it marinating our minds,
the first actual story in the book begins.
It’s called The Repairer of Reputations, and it’s where people seem to draw most
of their inspiration for The King in Yellow from.
It’s about a man named Hildred Castaign, who, after reading the play for the first
time, becomes embroiled in a cultish plot to overthrow the US government.
He’s convinced by a professional blackmailer who keeps a massive network of debtors that
he is the rightful heir to the thrown of the King in Yellow.
Together, they plan to erect an “Imperial Dynasty of America” built after the fashion
of the lost “Imperial Dynasty of Carcosa” from the play.
They believe that as the influence of the play has spread, the nation has become ready
for an uprising, and that in the end, they will welcome Hildred as their new king.
As this delusion takes hold, he becomes ever more sensitive about his mental health, lashing
out at anyone who expresses worry for him.
Before long he’s turned against everyone he loves.
He’s even willing to have his own cousin killed because he believes the man to be before
him in the line of succession, and thus the one thing blocking the way to his promised
kingdom.
Of course, all of this ends in tragedy for our deluded hero.
The sad coup, engineered by minds fractured and perverted through study of the play, inevitably
unravels at the seams.
As the authorities take him away to the asylum, he experiences a final moment of tragic clarity
and shouts to his baffled cousin: “Ah!
I see it now!
You have seized the throne and the empire.
Woe!
Woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!”
A bit of an about-face there, to go from wanting to be the king to crying out the Woe of anyone
who is crowned king.
But this theme of ruination in the promised paradise is one we’re going to see play
out over the course of the book.
Speaking of which, the second story—and my personal favorite—is called The Mask.
It’s… shockingly romantic for something so grim, but before it starts, it also gives
us one of the only other excerpts from the play itself that we ever get:
Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it's time.
We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.)
No mask?
No mask!
The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2.
Hold onto that.
You really need it to understand this one.
The story is one of longing, and change, and destiny.
Alec is an artist with a circle of friends that he treasures above all else.
One of them, Boris, is incredibly wealthy, living on a grand estate and funding novel
experiments in the fields of art and chemistry.
He even finds a new element that, in its liquid form, can turn living things to beautiful
rose marble statues almost instantly.
Another of Alec’s dear friends, Genevieve, is the love of his life—but she is also
Boris’s lover.
For all of their sakes, Alec does his best to be supportive of them in their relationship,
pretending that it doesn’t pain him.
He calls this effort his “mask”, and it reminds of the “pallid mask” from the
play.
Just like in the excerpt, he feels that the mask has stopped being a mask and become a
part of him.
Over the course of the story, as it becomes clear that his friends have also read the
play, fate seems to re-shuffle its hand for him.
Genevieve throws herself into a pool of Boris’s statue-creating liquid because of the agony
of her repressed love for Alec.
Boris takes his own life and leaves his entire estate to Alec.
Another friend travels abroad and becomes possessed with the idea that Alec is someone
of terrible importance, rushing back to see him.
And finally, it’s revealed that the effects of the statue chemical do not last forever.
Genevieve returns to life, and with no obstacles between them, she and Alec at last find their
love.
The impression is one of a prince coming into his inheritance.
As Alec dons the mask and at last becomes one with it, he takes the role of the interloper
in the play—the one we would assume to be the King in Yellow.
And leaving behind it a trail of madness and death, his world seems to rush the crown onto
his head.
The third story is quite a bit simpler than the first two, but It’s also very important.
It’s the only one that really seems to embrace the entity of the King in Yellow rather than
just the influence of the play.
But even then, the king himself seems to be more of a symbol than anything.
The story is called The Court of the Dragon, and it follows a man who, having read the
play, seeks the comfort of a familiar church house.
But something is wrong.
While the pastor gives a decidedly strange sermon on how nothing can harm the soul, the
organ music becomes dissonant, disturbing, almost nausea-inducing.
When the man looks at the organist to see who would play such a tune, he finds himself
met with the most hateful gaze he’s ever experienced.
He hurries out of the place, but the strange, pale organist follows him into the night,
stalking him all the way home.
He’s gripped by the notion that somehow, this man is death itself, and that there is
no escape.
When he’s finally captured, he is not killed, but spirited away to another world: the ruined
land of Carcosa, where the towers rise behind the moon and the cloud-waves break—the “awful
abode of lost souls”.
And for the first and only time, we encounter the King in Yellow himself, who wraps the
protagonist in radiance as he approaches, saying: “It is a fearful thing to fall into
the hands of the living God!”
I suppose that once the truth of the play has you, there is no God left to turn to,
no comfort left to find.
You are as good as lost.
And finally, our fourth story, after which the play is hardly—if ever—mentioned again
in the book: The Yellow Sign.
Again, if you’re a fan of the Cthulhu mythos, this should be ringing some bells.
And I’ll admit, this one is pretty pulpy compared to the others.
But it’s also different in another important way: the main character, Mr. Scott, has not
read the play.
In fact, he’s sworn it off entirely, knowing how it’s influenced people like the late
Hildred Castaign, who was his friend.
But the play is insistent.
Throughout the story, Scott is haunted by a strange, bloated, pale, corpse-like man
whose very presence makes it impossible for him to paint.
At the same time, he and his lover are both plagued by dreams of his death.
One night, not knowing what she’s done, she brings him a brooch she’s found in the
street.
It bears a strange yellow symbol, which belongs to no known language of man.
And as if this were an invitation, The King in Yellow suddenly appears in Scott’s library.
As they both succumb to its lure, reading it and discuss it in a daze, the corpse-like
man comes upon them like the reaper.
He rots the door’s lock at a touch, kills the girl, and then collapses into a pile of
fetid flesh, finally at rest.
When the authorities arrive, they say the man must have been dead for some time already.
The story ends with Scott in psychiatric care, praying for death.
But the prayers are cut short, and we never find out why.
So, it looks like the play is more than just a weird piece of literature that drives you
mad.
It really does seem like a virus, working through the will of the ones it touches to
make itself known, even to those who wish not to know it.
I wonder if its author even really had a choice…
After this story, the rest spiral off into what feels like pretty aimless romanticism.
Art nouveau culture in Paris, wartime ruminations on the nature of love, prophetic vignettes,
time traveling lovers, but hardly anything else about The King in Yellow.
It’s hard to know why these are in the collection at all, but there they are.
And still, even just in those first four stories, my goodness, there is a lot to find.
On its face, this all probably seems a lot less cosmic-horror-y than you might have expected.
I could go on for a very long time about my personal thoughts and interpretations.
The philosophical implications of all afterlives vanishing, a usurper god slipping in to take
their place, the journey of the soul becoming terminal rather than something transcendent…
but I really don’t think that’s the point of the play in these stories.
I think the play is actually something far more concrete, and surprisingly relatable.
To me, it serves as a demonstration.
Not just a powerful piece of literature unto itself, but a show of what words can truly
do.
An example of the pinnacle of language’s power to influence the ones who read or hear
it.
In the version of the book I read there’s a foreword by the writer Nic Pizzolatto, who
explains this so beautifully: “The idea of ‘magic words’ has always felt misunderstood
to me.
The magic is not the words themselves, or any particular word, because they are, after
all, empty vessels.
The magic is only ever using the right words the exact right way.
The secret knowledge lies in arranging, say, the twenty-six symbols of our English alphabet
into a configuration which reliably produces an intended effect upon the audience, perhaps
and even especially against that audience’s wishes—configurations most commonly categorized
as a story, poem, lyric, or play.
Then there’s no end to the capabilities of the language and its power over human beings,
its ability to engender the most overwhelming emotional states.
Put words to music and the entire world can move.”
We writers know this.
We’re almost obsessive about it, always searching for the right words, trying to create
the perfect effect.
It’s our way of working true magic.
And we can be so wrapped up in it, we don’t stop to consider the unintended consequences.
Think of the play.
Think of its dark, corrupting message.
As readers, we don’t know what that message actually is, only that it wants to spread.
I don’t think that’s particularly unique.
After a fashion, I’d say that all information wants to spread.
And language is its primary vector.
Be careful what you release into the world.
You aren’t responsible for what people take from your work, but you are responsible for
what you give.
Love your art enough not to make it a vector for falsehood, evil, hatred.
Love your words enough to choose them well.
And… that would be where the video ends… except...
I have more to say.
There’s a whole section of this video about my interpretation of the play itself.
I discuss the original short story that inspired it, as well as some references to mythology
to figure out what it may actually be about.
It’s a little beside the point and very speculative, so we ultimately had to trim
it out for time.
But…
I couldn’t quite let it all go.
I had to keep a full version of the video out there somewhere.
It seemed right.
Thankfully, there is a place where we can share that stuff.
Where we don’t have to worry about streamlining our content so that it’s a perfect fit for
attention spans and algorithms.
You can watch it over on our creator-owned streaming platform, Nebula.
Youtube is a weird place for educational content.
It’s hard to be as honest and open as you want to be while trying to satisfy the algorithm
and trying to dodge some kind of terrible fate like channel-wide demonetization.
So, a bunch of us educational creators got together and made our own platform where we
don’t have to worry about all of that.
You can find all our videos there ad-free, and full of additional content we normally
have to cut out for Youtube.
Including the extended version of this video.
And we’re not the only ones.
The same is true for so… many… other… amazing creators.
It’s a safe haven for the material we wish we could share here.
And the best part is that you don’t even actually have to pay for Nebula if you don’t
want to.
The good people at Curiosity Stream want to make sure we indie creators will always have
this special space, so they’ve decided to foot the bill for Nebula for anyone who signs
up with them.
Get a year of Curiosity Stream, and you get a year of Nebula for free.
If you like highly-produced documentaries—and I mean really highly produced, this beats
just about anything you’ll find on netflix—I cannot recommend Curiosity Stream enough.
It’s got thousands of titles, including videos about everything from prehistoric aquatic
monsters to the cutting edge of modern science.
But if you really enjoyed the strangeness of the King in Yellow—that dissonant feeling
that there is more darkness in this world than you may expect and you’re just one
book or conversation away from falling into its hands—then there’s one documentary
series on Curiosity Stream you’ve got to see.
It’s called “Secret Societies”, and follows several experts as they unravel the
strange iconography and ideals behind organizations like The Knights Templar and the Illuminati.
Think of it as a little taste of what a text like The King in Yellow might have caused
in real life.
Tale Foundry videos are a starting place for your imagination, but watch this documentary
and you will have so much more to work with, I promise.
Oh, and Curiosity Stream has also done their best to make it all accessible, too.
Tale Foundry fans who sign up for a year of access now will save 26% on their subscription.
That’s just $14.79 a YEAR—not per month, per year—for both Curiosity Stream and Nebula,
which is a ridiculous price for a streaming service.
Click the link in the description (or go to CuriosityStream.com/talefoundry) and use the
code “talefoundry” to get access to both streaming services for less than $15 a year.
And… that’s it for this video!
There’s usually a few weeks between uploads, so if you want more Tale foundry in the mean-time,
come join our community!
We have a discord server that’s basically like a big family of creatives—a lot of
love, there.
We also run writing groups on Twitch every week, if you want to get some practice in!
You can find links to all of it in the description.
Hope to see you there!
Until then, thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
I’ll see you…
next time.
Bye!