05/05/2026
Here’s our first look at The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, annotated by S. T. Joshi and illustrated by . This collection came out beautifully! This is an advance copy, our shipment will be with us in two weeks and will immediately head out the door to you.
Robert W. Chambers’s short story collection The King in Yellow (1895) has become a classic of weird fiction. It was praised by H. P. Lovecraft as a book that “achives notable heights of cosmic fear.” Its first several stories are interconnected narratives featuring recurring characters as well as a hideous play entitled The King in Yellow that induces madness in anyone who reads it. Such figures from that play as Cassilda, Camilla, and especially the King in Yellow himself have gone on to inspire dozens of writers to write stories inspired by Chambers’s conception—which he himself derived in part from Ambrose Bierce.
Included in the volume are such memorable tales as “The Repairer of Reputations,” which depicts a nightmare future of euthanasia chambers and a man who battles the King in Yellow for rulership of the world; “The Mask,” an exquisitely beautiful story of a woman turned into marble; “The Yellow Sign,” a towering work of gruesomeness and morbidity; and “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” in which a man drifts insensibly into the medieval past.
After a mesmerizing series of prose poems, “The Prophet’s Paradise,” The King in Yellow concludes with several memorable tales of the Franco-Prussian War of 187-71, in which Chambers—who studied art in Paris before writing his book—chronicles the grimness of war and the struggles of civilians to survive in its midst.
Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933) later became a bestselling author of historical and romance novels; but his reputation today rests largely on The King in Yellow, a work that, like its titular play, may itself induce madness and terror in those who read it.
We will have less than 200x copies available in our shop. Overseas customers will be able to purchase through Psilowave.com
# .T.Joshi HorrorFiction WeirdFiction ChiropteraPress Book
https://chiropterapress.com/collections/the-king-in-yellow-by-robert-w-chambers
