The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, had a surprising resurgence in the popular imagination a few years back thanks to the first season of True Detective. It’s a strange little book, mostly of horror stories but also including some tales of Parisian life from an author who primarily wrote romances. Its influence on H.P. Lovecraft cannot be understated, however.

The horror stories in the collection center on a play of the same name that warps reality and drives people mad. The King himself is an elusive and somewhat romantic figure, something that has made him the subject of countless Call of Cthulhu scenarios – in terms of villains for that RPG, he probably ranks third after Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu. Tatters of the King, which centers on the King and his nefarious Yellow Sign, stands in my mind as one of Chaosium’s best campaigns.

This is the 1977 Ace paperback. I found it in a delightful used bookstore in Gloucester, Massachusetts (a seafaring town that likely partially inspired Lovecraft’s Innsmouth), a year or two after I found a copy of the 1895 original. Like the work of Clark Ashton Smith, The King in Yellow was simply hard to find when I was reading this stuff in quantity and that elusiveness created a mystique that still sticks to the book all these years later. I wonder, in a post-True Detective world, if that is still the case for other readers.