Obscure references to “The Yellow King” in the television crime series True Detective pushed Robert Chambers’ 120 year old collection of short horror stories, The King in Yellow, into fourth place on Amazon’s overall best sellers chart this week, reports Rachel Stewart for The Telegraph. The show features Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as detectives trying to catch a serial killer in Louisiana.
The book is also at the top spot on Amazon UK’s classic horror chart and with the show premiering in the UK this weekend sales are likely to increase.
American crime series True Detective stars Matthew McConaughey as Detective Rustin Cohle on the trail of a serial killer in Louisiana. Sounds like pretty standard crime drama fare, at least until an obscure literary reference unlocks layers of nuance and sub-plot put in place by writer Nic Pizzolatto.
The book in question is Robert W Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a late 19th century collection of short horror stories featuring a fictional play, also called The King in Yellow, which will supposedly send any reader who ventures past the first act into a downward spiral of madness and despair.
Jared Shurin from Pornokitsch has written a guide to Chambers, one of his favourite authors, explaining that “The King in Yellow is in the “The King in Yellow” in The King in Yellow.”
He elaborates that the character, The King in Yellow, is in a play titled “The King in Yellow”, which is mentioned in four of Chambers’ short stories in his collection, The King in Yellow. Of those four stories, Shurin recommends “The Repairer of Reputations” and helpfully points out that the rush to buy the book isn’t necessary as the copyright on Chambers’ works has expired and The Yellow King can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
Thanks to True Detective, it seems like The King in Yellow is the most talked about eldritch entity of 2014 – a high honour indeed. Robert Chambers, the book’s author, is one of my favourite authors, so I thought I’d share a few fun-facts and links to further reading. You too can be a Chambers hipster!
The first album was not better. The King in Yellow (1895) was Chambers’ second book. His first, In the Quarter (1894) was a novel loosely based on Chambers’ own experiences as an art student in Paris. (Chambers was an art student – and professional illustrator – before he was a writer. His fellow student included Charles Dana Gibson, who even wound up illustrating a few of Chambers’ books.) In the Quarter is mercifully hard to find and, honestly, a bit poo. The King in Yellow, however, was an instant sensation.
True Detective executive producer and writer Nic Pizzolatto discusses the reference to The King in Yellow in this video from HBO, which includes scenes from the show:
Click here to view the embedded video.
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Book details
- The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers
EAN: 9781608640195
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Image courtesy The Wire