Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.
Today we’re looking at Robert W. Chambers’s “The Yellow Sign,” first published in his 1895 The King in Yellow collection. Spoilers ahead.
“Oh the sin of writing such words—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words—words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than Heavenly music, more awful than death itself.”
Summary
New York, circa 1890, a decade about to get decidedly less gay (or maybe the same 1920s Chambers forecast in “The Repairer of Reputations“). Narrator Scott is a painter whose Washington Park studio neighbors a church. Lounging in a window one afternoon, he notices the church watchman standing in its courtyard. Idle curiosity becomes revulsion when the man looks up. His face looks like nothing more than a “plump white grave-worm.”
Scott seems to carry the impression back to his painting—under his brush, the nude study’s arm turns sallow, nothing like pretty Tessie, his model, who glows with health. He tries to correct the error, but instead spreads the gangrenous contagion. He’s not imagining it, for Tessie demands to know if her flesh really looks like green cheese. Scott hurls his brushes through the ruined canvas. With easy familiarity, Tessie chastises him. Everything went wrong, she says, when Scott saw the horrid man in the courtyard. The fellow reminds her of a dream she’s had several times, including the night before. In it, she’s impelled to her bedroom window to watch a hearse rumble down the midnight street. The driver looks up, face as white and soft as if he were long dead. Without seeing the occupant of the coffin, she knows it’s Scott, still alive.
Scott laughs off the macabre vision, even after Tessie claims the watchman’s face is that of her hearse driver. She’s been working too hard. Her nerves are upset.
Next morning Scott talks to Thomas, bellboy at his apartment house. Someone’s bought the church next door, but Thomas doesn’t know who. That “worm” of a watchman sits all night on the steps and stares at honest folk all “insultin’ like.” One night Thomas punched the watchman. His head was cold and mushy, and fending him off, Thomas pulled off one of his fingers. From his window, Scott verifies that the watchman’s missing a middle finger.
Tessie models for a new study, chattering about a young man she’s met. Scott ponders how he’s watched her grow from awkward child to exquisite woman, and how someone will carry her off as soon as she falls in love. Man of the world though he is, with no inclination to marry himself, he’s a Catholic who takes comfort in the forms of the church. Tessie’s Catholic, too. He hopes that will keep her safe from men like him.
At lunch, Scott tells Tessie about his own hearse dream, and yes, he does ride alive in the glass-topped coffin, and does see Tessie in her window, and he identifies the driver as the church watchman. He meant to illustrate the infectiousness of dreams, but Tessie breaks into sobs. She fears for Scott, and—she cares for him. Instead of deflecting her confession with laughter or fatherly advice, Scott kisses her. Tessie departed, he stews over the mistake. Oh well, he’ll keep their new relationship Platonic, and eventually Tessie will tire of it. That’s the best he can do since he lost a certain Sylvia in the Breton woods, and all the passion of his life with her.
Next morning, having passed the night with an actress, he returns home to overhear the watchman mumbling. He resists a furious urge to strike him. Later he’ll realize the man said, “Have you found the Yellow Sign?”
Scott starts the day’s session by giving Tessie a gold cross. She reciprocates with an onyx clasp inlaid with a curious symbol. She didn’t buy it—she found it last winter, the very day she first had the hearse dream. [RE: Y’all don’t want to know how easy these are to get online.] Next day Scott falls and sprains his wrists. Unable to paint, he irritably roams his studio and apartment under Tessie’s commiserating gaze. In the library he notices a strange book bound in snakeskin. Tessie reaches it down, and Scott sees with horror that it’s The King in Yellow, an infamous book he’s always refused to buy or even leaf through, given its terrible effect on readers. He commands Tessie to put it back, but she playfully runs off with it and hides. Half an hour later he finds her dazed in a storeroom, book open before her.
He carries her to the studio couch, where she lies unresponsive while he sits on the floor beside her—and reads The King in Yellow from cover to cover. Its words, “more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death” overwhelm him. He and Tessie sit into the night discussing the King and the Pallid Mask, Hastur and Cassilda and the shores of Hali. Now that they know the onyx clasp bears the Yellow Sign, Tessie begs him to destroy it. He can’t, somehow. His communion with Tessie becomes telepathic, for they’ve both understood the mystery of the Hyades.
A hearse rattles up the street. Scott bolts his door, but its driver comes looking for the Yellow Sign. The bolts rot at his touch. He envelopes Scott in his “cold soft grasp.” Scott struggles, loses the clasp, takes a blow to the face. As he falls, he hears Tessie’s dying cry. He longs to follow her, for “the King in Yellow has opened his tattered mantle, and there was only God to cry to now.”
Scott writes this story on his deathbed. Soon he’ll confess to the waiting priest what he dares not write. Confession’s seal will keep the ravenous newspapers from learning more. They already know Tessie was found dead, himself dying, but not that the second corpse was a decomposed heap months dead.
Scott feels his life ebb. His last scrawl is “I wish the priest would—”
What’s Cyclopean: We hear much of the remarkable language of The King in Yellow, but never—thankfully—read any excerpts.
The Degenerate Dutch: Chambers’s watchman appears to have taken a page from Uncle Remus—but with an English immigrant rocking the heavy eye dialect. The probable satire is only a hair less sharp than in “Repairer of Reputations.”
Mythos Making: The King in Yellow was inspiration for the Necronomicon, which Lovecraft cited in turn as inspiration for Chambers’ creation of the fictional (?) play.
Libronomicon: You can get The King in Yellow bound in snakeskin. It’s probably snakeskin.
Madness Takes Its Toll: If The King in Yellow makes its way to your bookcase (mysteriously, possibly by drone delivery), you should not read it. Nor permit your guests to read it. Friends don’t let friends, etc.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Chambers messes with your head so wonderfully—perfect proto-Lovecraftian comfort food that leaves you wandering around asking what the hell just happened. Anyone who’s read The King in Yellow is, by definition, an unreliable narrator. And about to tell you something so horrific that you really wish you knew whether to trust it, but are kind of glad you don’t.
“Repairer of Reputations,” our previous Chambers read, takes place in 1920, unless it doesn’t, and involves a potential King-backed coup over a “utopian” (read “fascist”) United States, unless it doesn’t. “Yellow Sign” appeared in 1895, and seems to be contemporary, unless it isn’t. Our narrator is writing the whole thing down after reading the play, after all.
Though if enough people read the play, that might just result in the future portrayed in “Repairer.”
How is our narrator unreliable? Let me count the ways. From the start, he’s cagey about his past and self-contradictorily self-deprecating. He’s Catholic, gets comfort from confession, doesn’t like to hurt pretty women or leave them unmarriageable when he dumps them (all too easy in 1895). But he’s completely amoral, he assures us. Besides, his heart is with Sylvia, who is probably lost forever in the sunlit forests of Brittany. He’s unmarriageable, like a Trollopian heroine tainted by her first love. He lives in Hope. WTF happened in that backstory? How much of it is warped in his post-King retelling?
Then there’s the squishy watchman/hearse driver. An agent of the King? Entirely hallucinatory? He’s remarkably reminiscent of the folkloric tar baby. Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus collection came out in 1881, so an influence is very plausible. Remus’s bad rep post-dates Chambers—at the time it was one of the few windows a northern white dude was likely to have into Southern African American culture. But it certainly means something when Chambers chooses to translate the story from its original dialect into Cockney. Something sharp, I suspect.
The tar baby connection also provides hints about the watchman’s nature. Like the original, he has a knack for infuriating people by doing almost nothing. And like the original, acting on that anger is a bad, bad idea. It’s a trap! But set by whom? Is he, or his creator, responsible for the unsolicited book delivery? The purchase of the church? Tessie’s serendipitous jewelry acquisition? Another literary reference: Tessie plays the part of Eve here, persuaded to partake of forbidden knowledge, then sharing her Fall with the narrator. And so back to the narrator’s Catholicism, and his desire for confession.
I kind of love that the Fall doesn’t take the form of succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. That’s not even hinted at, even though it’d fit the narrator’s earlier protestations. Instead, they lose grace through… a late night book discussion. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? The joy of discovering someone who shares your fascination with Lovecraft, or Firefly, or Revolutionary Girl Utena… the strange synchronicity of opinions so in synch that they need not be spoken… the patina of debauchery imparted by sleep deprivation… There’s certainly nothing to compare with the intensity. It’s a wonder more stories don’t use it as metonymy for sin.
And then the ending. More WTF. Do we have murder by King’s agents? Murder-suicide? Multiple suicides? Has anyone actually died at all? We don’t even know whether to trust the narrator’s report of police reactions to the watchman’s body. If there is a body. If there was a watchman. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And who imagines them, trying to give form and face to an evil that might not, in fact, have either?
Anne’s Commentary
Here goes Yellow, once more associating its superficially cheery self with madness and decay. Mind-breaking wallpaper wasn’t enough for Yellow; no, in Chambers’ 1895 story collection, it clothes a terrible King and colors a Sign that exposes its owner (deliberate or accidental) to sinister influences and shattering knowledge. Yellow, how can I look at bananas and sunflowers the same way again?
The four dark fantasies in King in Yellow (“The Repairer of Reputations,” “The Mask,” “In the Court of the Dragon” and “The Yellow Sign”) were enough to earn Chambers very honorable mention in Supernatural Horror in Literature. Lovecraft felt they reached “notable heights of cosmic fear” and bemoaned the fact that Chambers later abandoned weird fiction for romance and historicals. Chambers could have been a contender, people. He could have been somebody, a “recognized master.” At least we have “The Yellow Sign,” which Lovecraft summarizes with zest and a certain odd omission or, shall we say, an obfuscation of a substantial subplot. That is, the GIRL.
Lovecraft tips his hand by sighing over Chambers’ “affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by [George] Du Maurier’s Trilby.” George was the grandfather of Daphne, and his Trilby was a turn-of-the-century blockbuster, selling 200,000 copies in the United States alone. Its depiction of bohemian Paris appealed to the romantic sensibility of a generation and urged young women to such depravities as smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, and reveling in unmarried independence. Just like Tessie in “The Yellow Sign.”
Tessie appears to have perturbed Lovecraft so much that she became literally unnamable. In his description of “Sign,” he thoroughly neuters her, or perhaps more accurately, neutralizes her presence as a sexual force. She’s known only as “another” who shares Scott’s hearse dream. Another what? Also, as “the sharer of his dream” and one of the “three forms” found dead or dying after the climax. I don’t know. Maybe Lovecraft was just worried about his word count and didn’t want to go into the whole Scott-Tessie relationship? Maybe he saw the romance as a disagreeable interruption of the shivery chills? Romance was certainly not his genre. We’ve already seen how little space the love stuff gets in his collaborations with Zealia Bishop and Hazel Heald; when it does break through, as in the truncated love-triangle of “Medusa’s Coil,” it seems a false note.
In Lovecraft’s solo work, falling in love is definitely no good thing. Look what happens to Marceline’s beaus, and Edward Derby, and Robert Suydam’s short-lived bride. Steady old couples like “Color Out of Space‘s” Gardners are all very well, though they too, um, fall apart in the end.
Best to leave the mushy stuff out whenever possible. [RE: Or at least avoid having pieces of it come off in your fist.] [AMP: Ew, ew, ew.]
Chambers doesn’t, though. That he would eventually make good money writing romance is presaged not only in the “non-weird” King in Yellow stories but by “Yellow Sign” itself. Scott’s evolving (and conflicted) connection to Tessie isn’t an afterthought; it shares about equal space with the scary elements. In fact it makes the scary elements scarier, the tragic outcome more poignant. In his own estimation, Scott’s kind of a jerk, the sort of man he hopes Tessie can escape. No marrying man, he’s taken advantage of women. He casually beds actresses. He’s annoyed when he doesn’t squelch Tessie’s love-confession instead of encouraging it with a kiss. He’s had his grand passion, still cultivates a flame for the mysterious Sylvia of the Breton forest. Yet he genuinely cares about Tessie, might have progressed beyond the Platonic relationship he intended for them, or, just as well, maintained that relationship with grace. Tessie is a charmer, after all. Audrey Hepburn could play her in the Ideally-Cast movie.
She’s also doomed, and why? Because she picks up a trinket in the street. A random event marks her with the Yellow Sign, and nothing’s random after that. She dreams the hearse. She dreams her beloved into a coffin, thus drawing him into the King’s web. She passes the Sign on to him, so of course the lethal book appears on Scott’s bookcase. Of course Tessie has to read it, and of course Scott does too, however forewarned.
Who buys the church, so the watchman can watch it? Who was he before he was dead and Death itself? What’s in that damn King in Yellow? Chambers dares let us decide and has the artistry to pull it off, so that even Howard overlooks the mushy stuff in the end and the King and Sign provoke our imaginations to this day. Why overlook the mushy stuff, though? Love and Death are an old, old couple, intricately knit one to the other, and picking at the stitches is one of the principal duties of art.
Next week, spend the end of your summer vacation in scenic Innsmouth: we’re reading Seanan McGuire’s “Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves.” You can, and should, find it in Aaron J. French’s The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft.
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian stories “The Litany of Earth” and “Those Who Watch” are available on Tor.com, along with the distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Winter Tide, a novel continuing Aphra Marsh’s story from “Litany,” will be available from the Tor.com imprint on April 4, 2017. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with the recently released sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
This is probably the best of the Yellow King stories, though really they’re all pretty good. My head canon wants to tie the events of this story together with whatever happened to Sylvia in that Breton forest. There is also a brief reference to Castaigne, which would seem to mean the events of “The Mask”. Our narrator is clearly not as unaware of these things as he would have us believe.
I wonder if the wormy nature of the watchman influenced HPL in “The Festival”. I fear he loses some menace, because in my head I can only see him as Uncle Fester the was Chas. Addams drew him. And I never made the tar baby connection.
Taken as a whole TKIY is awesome, IMO … but it’s kind of odd how it’s 75% weird fiction and 25% romance.
Ah, “The Yellow Sign.” Definitely a good tale, but not, I think, the best in THE KING IN YELLOW. For my money, the mind-twisting weirdness of “Repairer” just edges past it for the gold.
Department of continuity: As for how “Sign” relates to “Repairer,” here’s what I worked out for the “Repairer” re-read:
The narrator of “The Yellow Sign” knows Hildreth:
“What is it?” I asked.
“The King in Yellow.”
I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages.
“The Yellow Sign” is clearly not set in 1920. There are no suicide chambers, etc. Indeed, the tale might be set prior to the 1890s, as evidenced by this reference:
“And you, Thomas?”
The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.
“Mr. Scott, sir, I ain’t no coward, an’ I can’t make it out at all why I run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an’ was shot by the wells.”
The battle of Tel-el-Kebir was an actual battle, and it happened in 1882. Since Thomas is described as a “young fellow,” the story can’t be set in 1920, as that would mean that he was in his 60s. Assuming that Thomas was around 18 in 1882 (he might have been younger), that would mean that he was born around 1864. So, that would imply that both “Yellow Sign” and “Repairer” are set in the late 1880s-early 1890s.
Then there’s also the matter of Boris Yvain, who is discussed in “Repairer” and plays a role in “The Mask”:
It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafés and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafés and restaurants were torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble group of the “Fates” stood before the door, the work of a young American sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years old.
(“Repairer of Reputations”)
We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of the “Fates.” He [Boris Yvain] leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor’s chisel and squinting at his work.
[…..]
We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the strength of his having been born in America, although his father was French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the same familiar way—Jack Scott and myself.
(“The Mask”)
And the Jack Scott referenced above is the narrator of “The Yellow Sign.”
Bearing all this in mind, the internal chronology looks like this:
1.“The Mask”: The Fates is unfinished.
2.Repairer of Reputations”: Boris Yvain is dead and the Fates is finished.
3. “The Yellow Sign”: Hildred Castaigne is dead.
Personally this is my favourite of Chamber’s weird fiction stories, and like DemetriosX I never made the connection to tar baby, but it does fit nicely with the time.
I think the reason this is my favorite is because of the slowly mounting dread. For the first part of the story you know something is going to go bad, but you just can’t figure out what. That’s why I think the references to Syliva work well, it made me think that her death would be involved somehow. The romance is written well enough, and since you know something is going to go bad it raises the tension. The idea of two people growing closer together in both love and nightmare works well for me. After all, both love and nightmares can make us feel like we have no control over our life and Scott choosing to read The King in Yellow in an act of both joining Tessie and following his pre-ordained doom fits well.
Dr Strangelove meets Lovecraft: Just found out that Stanley Kubrick was acquainted with HPL’s work. From an an interview that he gave just prior to the opening of THE SHINING in the USA:
In previous films, you have worked within the conventions of specific genres (science-fiction, thriller, war film, etc.). Were you attracted to The Shining because it gave you the opportunity to explore the laws of a new genre in your career?
About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn’t help writing the screen-play, but I think it’s an interesting insight into the genre. And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people’s imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn’t, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling.
http://www.cinephiliabeyond.org/stanley-kubricks-treatment-of-the-shining/
For all its more cheerful connotations, it’s worth noting that the color yellow has other connotations that are less cheerful. Yellow is the color of jaundice. When white cloth ages, it turns yellow. Yellow is the color of infection, sores dripping with yellow pus.
I don’t think it’s any great leap of logic to suggest that when we speak of the King in Yellow, we’re really speaking of the king of infection, of decay. At least, I think that’s a viable interpretation, and it dovetails nicely with His messenger, the night watchman at the church, appearing as a decayed corpse.
It may be all the talk of churches and Catholicism in this story in particular that tempts me to equate the King in Yellow with Pestilence, of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That may be a stretch, but it kind of fits with the idea from “Repairer of Reputations” that the arrival of the King would signal the beginning of a new order.
Great, I’m actually giving myself the creeps.
Reaction to the plot epigraph: Yeah, that’s how I sometimes feel about Shakespeare.
Reaction to the second paragraph: That reminds me of the Goosebumps book Say Cheese and Die (and its sequel), about a curse Polaroid camera that shows grisly things happening to its photograph subjects, things which then happen.
Seanan McGuire wrote a story about Deep Ones?! Holy Carp. She writes aquatic humanoids so well, and I always crush on them. I’m scared.
Wrychard Wricthen @@@@@ 3: I like it. Cosmic horror always stands out more when it interrupts the everyday, and what could be more everyday than fraught dating relationships?
Trajan23 @@@@@ 4: That all makes sense. Which worries me…
AeronaGreenjoy @@@@@ 8: Ee. Yes, your trepidation is justified; you should brace yourself for this one.
Re Shakespeare and words: It’s kind of too bad this is specifically a Lovecraft Reread or you would have gotten a whole post about the jaw-droppingly amazing production of Merchant of Venice I saw by the Globe’s traveling production a couple of weeks ago. Up there with the King in Yellow for late-night awestruck discussions. I was there with 15 other people, all of whom came out crying. (Short version, because I can’t resist: They made Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, the emotional center of the play–everything focused around her relationship with Lorenzo, and increasing conflict over her own conversion, and realization of what her father had, in his own twisted way, been trying to protect her from. All with the original text intact, just little choices of tone and body language, and the sort of song-and-dance scenes that you can add in to Shakespeare anywhere.)
Getting back to Lovecraft, a brief plug: I got Winter Tide ARCs in the mail today! I’m giving one away on Twitter and Livejournal, both platforms linked in my bio.
I find the name Sylvia quite suggestive, especially since she’s not described as definitely dead– he still hopes– but ‘lost’, somewhere in the Breton woods. Sylvia, of course, means ‘from the forest’, and the woods of Brittany have long been considered uncanny, the territory formerly held by the now-sunken City of Ys.
In fact, there is a story called ‘The Demoiselle d’Ys’, in which a young man hunting in a forest becomes lost, is invited back to the Chateau d’Ys, home of a young woman and her attendants, not located in the world he knows. He is attacked by a snake, and finds himself suddenly in the ruins of the castle, looking at a gravestone proclaiming that the young lady died in 1573 for love of somebody with his name.
Chambers is the author, and the story appears in The King in Yellow. Even though the names are different, it seems clear to me that this is the backstory of Scott and Sylvie, and that Scott still hopes to fall through time and make it come out differently.
Wikipedia tells me that the girl’s name in ‘Demoiselle’, Jeanne d’Ys, is a homophone of jaundice, the yellow of the plague.
The original folklore of Ys, by the way, holds that the city sank because its young princess made a pact with the devil. Though Jeanne seems innocent enough in ‘Demoiselle’, one of her servant’s names is Hastur, and the snake attack is reminiscent of the Melusine legends of the same area. The word used for the snake in the story is ‘couleuvre’, which is indeed French for grass-snake, but also reminiscent of the English ‘color’. So I think Jeanne may well be toying with him.
And, now that I think on it, if Jeanne/Sylvia is evil and in league with/part of whatever is going on with the King in Yellow, that explains why Tess found the Yellow Sign– Scott is not to be allowed an ordinary human romance if his ex has anything to say about it. The trap is targeted as much at Tess as at Scott; she has much less knowledge about the occult than he and picks things up and opens books innocently. Sylvia might well expect Scott not to follow Tess, since he knows better (Tess always saw him alive in the coffin, after all, which argues either that this wasn’t meant to kill him or that, on some level, he doesn’t die). Or it might make no difference what he does. In which case, his end is also, ironically, his hopes fulfilled, which sounds like Chambers to me.
Thank you for including Chambers in this reread. I had read his work before, but not with this level of detailed attention, and he’s a much, much better writer than I had ever realized.
@9: “I hate everything. I don’t.” — Mark Oshiro
It can’t be worse than what acting in The Tempest did to me, right? (Answer: Possibly). Damn Caliban, and consequently the guy playing him, messed me up for years. *grumblegrumble*
*locates my octpus plushie with which to hit things*
@10: Cool etymology. Thanks!
@11: One of the staff at my college is named Jean Sylvia, so I pictured her when you said “Jeanne/Sylvia.” What is my brain.
Sylvia is probably a fairy from Brocéliande.
The yellow sign reminds me of the star Jews had to wear in Nazi Germany. The hearse in which the occupant is still alive is the trains that take Jews to concentration camps. The book with supernatural powers fits the fascination of some important Nazis with the occult. Did Himmler read it (or these stories)? The death chambers in the other story also fit the theme. The story seems to be written by a time traveller/prophet since it appeared before those events.
@10, @11: and there you go giving _reasons_ for this stuff to happen to our protagonists. I was wondering if the Sign just kinda wandered around cursing random people to the touch of the King in Yellow’s avatars [1], and the book tagged along after it.
[1] I was theorizing the watchman was a corpse being puppeteered by the King, who takes back the Sign (to drop it off somewhere else and start the cycle again?) and abandons the body to return to its job of decaying.
@10, 11 Ooh, that is really interesting. I haven’t read any Chambers apart from the two stories included in the reread so far, but it seems clear from what I’ve read and what others have said that Chambers intended for all of his weird fiction to be connected, and not just by the eponymous King, so your interpretation may well be correct.
Lovecraft did not read Chambers until years after he invented the Necronomicon, and expressed amazement that a writer known for shopgirl romances had written horror fiction.
I recall reading somewhere that at the turn of the 19th century yellow was a color that symbolized decadence in the same way green is envy, red is rage etc.
As I mentioned previously, “The Yellow Sign” is my favourite story from this excellent cycle (I hope that the others will soon be covered.)
One thing that stuck in my mind: is the looking at it in bookstores bit quoted @@.-@. This may be intended as unreliable narrator stuff but I like to imagine unwary amateur dramatics groups and book clubs buying it in.
@18: if it just pops up in people’s private libraries, why shouldn’t it also materialize in bookstores?
@17:”I recall reading somewhere that at the turn of the 19th century yellow was a color that symbolized decadence in the same way green is envy, red is rage etc.”
The Significance of Yellow: All over the place in the 1890s. There’s THE YELLOW BOOK (1894-97) coming out of London, the standard bearer in the Anglosphere for all things decadent and aesthetic. The Yellow Press (the term emerges in the middle of the decade). And then there’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (talk about a name out of a Lovecraft story!) “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), which HPL praised quite highly.