The King in Yellow

I first heard this book mentioned in a novel called The High House, where it was one of the volumes in the anarchist library. In the margins there was a note that it drove the reader mad.
So I googled it and discovered that it was in fact a real book.
As it turns out, The King in Yellow is a rather curious collection of short stories by Robert Chambers. The first four stories, The Repairer of Reputations, The Mask, In the Court of the Dragon, and The Yellow Sign are linked together by a play called The King in Yellow, which drives mad anyone how reads the second Act. Then there is a collection of curious semi-poetic called The Prophets Paradise. Finally, there are several romantic short stories.

Generally, Chambers is remembered first and foremost for the first four stories. H.P. Lovecraft would later be inspired by them and adapt several of their elements for his Cthulu myth.

These stories, especially In the Court of the Dragon, suggest a sort of melancholic madness that is characteristic of Poe. As Christianity portrays the universe as something fundamentally good and ordered, Chambers gives a vision of a universe that is fundamentally mad. Christian horror shows a sudden black on a white field. Dracula is an example of this. The vampire represents a perversion of the love between Jonathan and Mina, and in the end their love is stronger. Throughout Dracula there points were the holy powers work to thwart the monster.

In The King in Yellow however, all spiritual powers are hostile. There is a sense of them being something utterly alien to humanity. It is hard to tell wether they work in something beyond reason or below it.

In man there are two fears, the fear of things in the dark and the fear of darkness itself. Monsters are less frightening in that one can wrap the mind around them. They are at best, merely emissaries of the terror of something older and stronger than the earth. This terror is the driving force of The King in Yellow.