New Tales of the Yellow Sign Read online

  New Tales of the Yellow Sign

  By Robin D. Laws

  Foreword: Kenneth Hite

  Cover illustration: Jérôme Huguenin

  Cover design: Hal Mangold

  Proofing: Lucya Szachnowski

  Thanks to: Steve Dempsey, Will Hindmarch, Monica Valentinelli

  Text copyright © 2012 by Robin D. Laws

  All rights reserved.

  To Simon Rogers, gentleman and adventurer

  Table of Contents

  “I Pray God May Curse the Writer”: Introduction by Kenneth Hite

  Full Bleed

  Gaps

  The Blood on the Wall in the Fortress

  A Boat Full of Popes

  Distressing Notification

  Pendulous

  The Dog

  Fuck You You're Not Getting Out of This Car

  About the Author

  “I Pray God May Curse the Writer”: Robert W. Chambers and Robin D. Laws

  Foreword by Kenneth Hite

  “These mists are bad for you; they seep

  Into everything. Come inside.”

  —The King in Yellow (Act I, Scene I, lines 8-9)

  It is, I suppose, possible that even someone who opens a book entitled New Tales of the Yellow Sign has done so without knowledge of the first revelation, and of the Yellow Sign’s first inscriber, Robert W. Chambers. Born in Brooklyn in 1865, Chambers initially trained as an artist, eventually moving to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian. In 1893, he returned to New York, settling into Bohemian urban life in Washington Square, an area of Manhattan where many of his first stories are set. During this time, Chambers wrote a picaresque novel of the art world (In the Quarter) and a number of short stories, which were published in 1895 as a collection entitled The King in Yellow. The success of this book was apparently the hinge that turned Chambers from an artist to a writer: he began a career that lasted almost four decades and produced something like eighty books, mostly historical romances. The proceeds from this procession of potboilers made him wealthy and, as far as anyone can tell at this remove, happy. He moved from New York City to a fine mansion in upstate Broadalbin, collected butterflies and armor, and apparently never looked back at the Yellow Sign again.

  Those who have already seen the Yellow Sign are doubtless chortling to themselves at the perversity of this outcome. Chambers’ first collection introduced a book—specifically, a play—also called The King in Yellow. Two acts in length, it tells of the court of the lost city of Carcosa on the shores of the Lake of Hali, and their despair at the coming of the King in Yellow. Suppressed by church and state alike, the drama’s poisonous art is inescapable: even to read one scene is to be drawn inexorably to madness, obsession, and death. In short, it does the exact opposite of what Chambers’ fiction did to him. Chambers may have begun his career as one of his own Bohemian protagonists, but he escaped the gravitational well of his own fantasy far more easily than Poe, Bierce, or Lovecraft did. He returned to fantastic fiction off and on through his later career, writing tales of semi-mythical monster hunts (collected in In Search of the Unknown and Police!!!, which seem to prefigure Unknown Worlds-style ironic science-fantasy and the works of Avram Davidson), vile Bolshevik magicians (in Slayer of Souls, a pulpy Fu Manchu-style novel of violent paranoia), and the occasional reincarnated true love. But aside from two brief mentions of the “King in Carcosa” in his 1896 story “The Silent Land,” he never returned to the “King in Yellow Mythos” he had (mostly) invented.

  Even during his lifetime, critics accused him of turning his back on a prodigious and promising talent in the name of cheap, common-denominator success. Some of this was doubtless politically charged: Chambers abandoned a brief stint of social criticism for happy endings, costume dramas, and love stories, and eventually became a pillar of the Republican Party in New York. (My personal theory is that his Dreiser-style social commentary was as much a marketing gimmick as any number of his happy endings, but one that proved personally and financially uncongenial.) Other critics—including Lovecraft—simply bewailed the lost masterpieces of horror they imagined Chambers would have produced absent the siren call of Mammon. (Lovecraft called Chambers a “fallen Titan.”) Chambers’ response to all such criticism was self-deprecating good humor: “I write what it pleases me to write; by luck it may please the public.” The critic Grant Overton (apparently with Chambers’ blessing) presented Chambers as merely a gifted storyteller whose audience mistook their own early enthusiasm for evidence of his literary genius. The few modern critics who bother to notice Chambers simply echo these plaints, usually in the negative key droned by Lovecraft and the social realists.

  Like most best-sellers, Chambers’ novels faded with their times. Had it not been for Lovecraft’s enthusiastic response to The King in Yellow, and his inclusion of “Hastur and the Yellow Sign” in his own tale “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Chambers might be entirely forgotten, or only mentioned in passing or occasional anthologization. As it is, except for three stories in The King in Yellow (“The Repairer of Reputations,” “In the Court of the Dragon,” and “The Yellow Sign”) he remains a footnote to a footnote even in the histories of fantasy and of popular fiction. This isolated survival is certainly good for horror aficionados—“The Yellow Sign” is every bit as chilling as Lovecraft says it is—but to return to our perverse parallel, it leaves us fixated, perennially wondering how (or why) Chambers closed the book and left Carcosa behind. So obsessed with that question are we, that we barely bother to ask how he found Carcosa in the first place.

  The words “Carcosa,” “Hali,” and “Hastur” come from two short stories by Ambrose Bierce, which Chambers probably read upon his return from France. (“Hali” specifically comes from an Arabian alchemist who also lent his name to the constellation Taurus, another element in these bits of Bierce and Chambers.) But Chambers’ stories owe almost nothing to Bierce stylistically, although Bierce’s message of bleak nihilism peeks out in Chambers’ tales “Repairer of Reputations” and “The Street of the First Shell.” The first of those stories begins the “King in Yellow mythos” with a tour de force of unreliable narration, surreal predictions, and psychological disintegration that anticipates Michael Moorcock and Robert Bloch. The second is a “straight” historical tale set during the Franco-Prussian War, not part of the King in Yellow cycle at all. Indeed, only four or five of the tales in The King in Yellow are supernatural; the rest are highly colored episodes of art and love, which subjects also recur in the “Carcosan” tales themselves.

  Separating Chambers from Chambers is a fundamentally artificial act: all of the stories in The King in Yellow come from the same voice, evoke the same parts of Paris or New York, touch on love lost forever and the permanence of death. Lovecraft felt Chambers’ tone came from the “Gallic studio atmosphere” of George du Maurier’s novel of hypnosis Trilby; Robert M. Price is on safer ground noting parallels to Oscar Wilde’s overheated artistic masterpiece The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Other critics have briefly noted the devilish books and obsessions in J.-K. Huysmans’ “manuals for the Decadents,” À Rebours and Là-Bas; my French isn’t up to the task, but I’ll wager instructive parallels with Chambers could be found in the uncertainty horror of Guy de Maupassant. Chambers must have read reams of short stories and novels now forgotten, all part of his fin-de-siècle Bohemian milieu, the heyday of The Yellow Book and “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” As James Blish put it in his own Chambers tribute, the short story “More Light”: “It was terribly dated. I suppose no man living today is in a position to understand why so many of the writers of the 1890s thought that yellow was an especially ominous color.”

  And yet, yellowed
with age though they are, redolent of “Gallic studio atmosphere” and other musty antiquarianisms, Chambers’ stories still haunt us. We, not he, are unable to put down The King in Yellow, to stop masticating those poisoned, haunting hints, of Yhtill and Aldones, of the black stars hanging in the white sky over lost Carcosa, of the song of Cassilda and the Stranger in the Pallid Mask. A few writers find themselves returning to Chambers far more than did Lovecraft or even Clark Ashton Smith, who drew his seemingly similar tones of art and decadence from the San Francisco poet George Sterling decades before he encountered Chambers’ fiction. Worthy “Carcosa Mythos” fiction is even rarer than worthy Cthulhu Mythos fiction, but a certain type of horrorist can no more resist the advent of The King in Yellow than Chambers’ own protagonists could.

  Karl Edward Wagner’s “The River of Night’s Dreaming” presents a more red-blooded and sensual counterpoint to Chambers’ odd reticence, though still steeped in madness and obsession. James Blish takes a stab at actually composing the text of the play, in “More Light,” a story that owes more to Robert Bloch or Fredric Brown in style. Fritz Leiber seems to channel Chambers in a number of tales, most especially Our Lady of Darkness. On the surface a tribute to Clark Ashton Smith, Leiber’s novel resounds with Chambers’ own obsessions from eerily corporeal hauntings to the Franco-Prussian War. John Scott Tynes, who has done much to re-introduce a Chambers-style King in Yellow to horror gaming, takes his Chambers with a hit of Raymond Chandler (who wrote his own story wryly entitled “The King in Yellow”) or perhaps James Ellroy in “Broadalbin.”

  And then there is Robin D. Laws, and there is the collection of stories you hold here. All of these New Tales of the Yellow Sign orbit lost Carcosa, black star points poked through the white scrim of consensus reality by the force of Chambers’ book. But each swings past on its own trajectory, a mix of styles and concerns in counterpoint to Chambers’ unified “Gallic studio atmosphere” of the Yellow Decade. Each story launches itself in fugue from one (or more) of Chambers’ originals, passages that Laws plays adagio or largo on different instruments, plays for modern dancers and not Victorian wallflowers.

  “Full Bleed” riffs off “The Repairer of Reputations,” through a procedural tenor recalling both Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled fictions and the first-person “fantasy of competence” that fearful 21st-century readers crave from their security romances. Laws’ “Gaps” is a long-form, secular variation on the theme Chambers sets down in “In the Court of the Dragon,” invoking in negative space the games of memory in “Repairer of Reputations,” the loss and wonder of “The Demoiselle D’Ys,” and in muted tones the shifts in “The Prophets’ Paradise.” Although the war in “The Blood on the Wall in the Fortress” begins in 1947 in another history, the fortress sits in Alsace, target and symbol of the Franco-Prussian War that Chambers used in a more personal catastrophe in “The Street of the First Shell.” The plot echoes “The Yellow Sign” in its portents, its artistic protagonist, and its inevitable approach of death; the tone is post-Remarque, post-trenches, almost documentary realism approaching the unreal. If the narrator of “A Boat Full of Popes” echoes any SF writer in tone, it might be Heinlein or Van Vogt, but must his rational world-view debilitate itself to un-jam the future seen by Hildred Castaigne in “The Repairer of Reputations”? Laws audaciously uses this reliable modernism to map that foundational Chambers story of uncertainty and romance.

  “Distressing Notification” is a hipster thriller that draws its themes from Chambers’ own Frankenstein tale “The Mask” even as apps replace alchemy. Here, the modernist, even quotidian, voice echoes Raymond Carver, or (in its self-obsessed narrator) Stephen King. This is mystery as horror, contrasted with SF as horror in “A Boat Full of Popes.” The next step, “Pendulous” turns “chick fic” to horror with the barest leitmotif of motiveless malignity, an even more soul-dead Bridget Jones maneuvering for the corner office as “skygaunts” and “yellow phenomena” shred the world outside. Architecture and a whiff of Carcosa connect this tale to the Yellow Sign, but the story is like “Rue Barrée” in negative: love inert rather than impossible, a society dismembered rather than repressed. “The Dog” returns to the Castaigne future, now in its decrepitude. The tale’s flashes of humor and resilience reveal Fritz Leiber or even Robert Bloch country. Here, something larger catches the protagonist in its jaws, something that may remind readers of Frank Belknap Long down to the catch-penny revolution spouted by the self-aggrandizing Resistance cell in the story. I catch a whiff of “The Street of Four Winds” from this one, also, with its thanatic pet and the search for a lover. Finally, “Fuck You You’re Not Getting Out of This Car” returns again to the structure and themes of “The Repairer of Reputations,” but in Clive Barker’s voice this time, a self-hating stream of consciousness that simultaneously tears off the Pallid Mask and recoils from the facelessness beneath.

  Robert W. Chambers saw behind the same Pallid Mask. He saw the Yellow Sign, and refused to look at it again. Instead, he wrote romances, and crime stories, and spy thrillers, and science fiction, and war stories. Now Robin Laws creates lovers, and criminals, and spies, and technicians, and soldiers—and they all behold the Yellow Sign. All roads lead to Carcosa. Chambers looked away from it. Laws looks behind it. In every story in these new tales, Laws returns not to the Yellow Sign but to its signified: to the solipsistic world made somehow both inevitable and chaotic. He never attempts Chambers’ pastiche, but adapts voices from later centuries, voices trained to different vocabularies. Toronto hipsters replace Left Bank Bohemians, the atmosphere recirculates from Canadian coffeehouse rather than Gallic studio, but the sweat-sharp reek somehow remains the same, of desperate striving in the face of—not hostility, per se, but a Carcosan disinterest. No matter which curtain Laws raises, we always look out onto the Lake of Hali. No matter which author he pulls from the shelf, no matter what the title or illustration on the book jacket, we always see the words of that poisonous play, the drama that shows us nothing is true and nothing is permanent, not even impermanence and lies.

  Perhaps in a hundred years a handful of critics will ask themselves, not why did Robert W. Chambers close The King in Yellow, but why did Robin D. Laws open it up again? Perhaps they will echo the words of Hildred Castaigne: “I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world.” Until then, poison and beauty lay behind and before you, in any color you want.

  Breathe deep.

  Full Bleed

  Mar 29. As per instructions, establish surveillance of subject AUBRET MICHAEL. Observe subject departing his basement apartment near Major and Ulster. Follow Aubret to Profundity, a coffee shop on Augusta (in Kensington Market). Aubret sits at counter. Greets other habitues by name, picking up from past conversations. Might therefore be deemed a regular. Server behind counter prepares his order (double espresso) without having to ask. Conversation casual: an art opening, hangover cures, the Leafs sucking. Topics broached do not include the text. Subject has his portfolio with him but does not open it.

  Mar 30. Subject does not emerge from his apartment.

  Mar 31. Subject emerges from his apartment to purchase groceries. Returns an hour later. Determination is made to surveil his associates to determine degree of connection to the text (if any.) Will attempt to establish self as regular at Profundity (henceforth “target site.”) Sit at counter. Order subject’s beverage. Listen in on conversation between regulars, waiting for natural opportunities to chime in. Talk is of bands with which I am not conversant. Manage a few comments on pricing at nearby vintage clothing stores. Mention comics but garner no response.

  Apr 3. Observe subject departing apartment. Follow to target site. Establish plausible interval, then enter and sit down at counter. Topic of discussion is ultimate fighting. Fail to contribute. Friend of subject’s, the fighting aficionado, introduces himself as Mariano. He is probably hitting on me. This interchange provides avenue to be introduced to others: server Steph, young artsy type Daniel, Daniel’s g
irlfriend Margerethe (German national on student visa.) Nothing on comics or the text. Portfolio remains closed.

  Apr 4-6. Subject at Profundity each day. Achieve further assimilation into community of regulars. Shallow affiliations of 20-30 year old slacker/arts types primarily unified by common cafe facilitate infiltration. But then surface is all there is; there are no depths to pierce.

  Meet various others in group. Some are friends outside this place, others limit their contact to coffee chat here. Mariano asks me to club district Friday. Tell him I am coming off a bad breakup. Subject is withdrawn, allows others to dominate conversation. Portfolio remains closed, no mention of text.

  Apr 8. Subject absent from Profundity. Discussion momentarily touches on terrible murder that took place here over a year ago. Could this be touchpoint for subject’s interest in the text?

  Apr 7. Subject departs for Profundity at his usual time. Hang back, arriving approx. 30 min later. Upon arrival, subject sitting at table alone. Portfolio is open. In adopted persona as bubbly young hipster, I take innocent glance at it. Subject shuts portfolio. Fleeting glance renders it impossible to say whether current project does in fact invoke the text. Subject contends it’s unfinished, isn’t very good yet. I take liberty of sitting with him. Subject seems flustered but does not object. I talk to him about comics. Tell him I read this web series by a Michael Aubret. He is taken aback. Attempts to be forthcoming but is inarticulate.

  Apr 8. Subject not observed leaving apartment.

  Apr 9. Subject not observed.

  Apr 10. Absent observation of subject, continue establishing cover at target site. Steph full of smiles and hints. Drift is that subject appears to have been asking about me. Conclusion: subject is extreme introvert, a complicating factor in any attempt to establish trust relationship.