Resumen
Resumen de The King in Yellow
Para quién es
For readers who love quiet dread, hints rather than monsters, and a taste of nineteenth century Paris, with tender tales of young artists alongside stories of madness and menace.
De qué trata este libro
The King in Yellow is a book of ten pieces by the American writer Robert W. Chambers, published in 1895. He had trained as an artist in Paris, and that city fills the book. The first four stories are linked by a strange object: a play, also called The King in Yellow, that drives its readers toward madness. The later pieces move away from horror into Breton legend, prose poems and tender tales of young artists in the Latin Quarter.
You get the substance of the whole book here. You meet the play and the places its shadow falls, from a future New York to a painter's studio. You also see how Chambers lets a few names, Carcosa, Hastur, the Yellow Sign, hint at a vast nightmare without ever explaining it. Those hints are why later writers of weird fiction, from H. P. Lovecraft on, borrowed from this book. Let us begin with the play itself, the thing all the early stories fear.
En este resumen
- 1A play that no reader survives unharmedFree
- 2A madman plans to rule a future America
- 3Beauty and terror in an artist's Paris
- 4A brooch, a watchman and a hearse
- 5From nightmare to Breton legend and Paris romance
- 6How Chambers builds dread from what he leaves out
Idea clave 1 de 6
A play that no reader survives unharmed
The book opens with a verse from the play itself and then with the idea that holds the early stories together. There is a play called The King in Yellow. Its first act is harmless and even lovely. The trouble comes in the second act, where the words, we are told, strike the reader with a terror he cannot shake.
Chambers gives us only scraps of this play. We hear of a mysterious city named Carcosa, of twin suns sinking behind a lake, of a woman named Cassilda, and of a pale king whose cloak is yellow. We also hear of Hastur, a name that drifts through the tales without a clear meaning. The king himself wears a Pallid Mask, and his sign, the Yellow Sign, is a symbol that marks those he has chosen.
The cleverness is in what is left out. The play is never printed in the book, so the reader cannot check how bad it really is. Each story shows only its effect on some unlucky person, and those effects differ. One man becomes grandly deluded, another becomes haunted, and a third is simply hunted.
This is why the book works like a rumor. You feel that the play is real and that the author knows more than he says. Keep that in mind as we enter the first story, set in a New York that did not yet exist when Chambers wrote.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- Hildred Castaigne
- The narrator of The Repairer of Reputations is a young New Yorker who trusts Mr. Wilde and imagines imperial power.
- Mr. Wilde
- A shopkeeper surrounded by cats and files, he claims power over reputations and encourages Hildred's ambitions.
- Boris Yvain
- A young sculptor working in Paris in The Mask, he discovers a fluid that transforms living things into stone.
- Scott
- A New York painter and Tessie's employer, he is troubled by a sinister church watchman near his studio.
- Tessie Reardon
- Scott's model and friend, she loves the painter and suffers disturbing dreams involving a hearse.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 73,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 4 h 55 min
- Listening time8 h 10 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary; paperback, hardcover and large print at cost
- LanguagesEnglish and 14 other languages