The play which links the first five stories, the group I’ll call here the ‘mythos stories,’ is said to drive mad anyone who reads it it’s not clear if it has ever been performed. The sixth story is a set of brief prose poems, while the final four stories are basically mimetic and seem to have nothing to do on a plot level with the first five - though they have certain motifs and themes in common. The first five tales mention the play to varying extents, and all have other fantastic elements, as well as a horrific or weird tone. The book’s made up of ten short stories, plus a poem supposedly extracted from a play called The King in Yellow. Lovecraft, who used some of the book’s ideas in his Cthulhu mythos in fact, the book’s inspired a mythos of its own, complete with a wiki site, as well as any amount of further fiction, music, and games. Published in 1895, it was celebrated by H.P. Chambers’s collection of linked short stories, The King in Yellow. Today, I want to look at one of the founding classics of the weird, Robert W. October draws to a close and so it’s time to turn to horror and the supernatural, to the weird tale and the things that cannot be known.
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