THE DEEP ONES: "The Yellow Sign" by Robert Chambers

"The Yellow Sign" by Robert W. Chambers (pub. 1895)

DISCUSSION BEGINS ON OCTOBER 19, 2011



Online sources:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Sign
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/YellSign.shtml
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8492
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/library/stacks/literature/chambers/stori...

Print Versions:

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
The Spawn of Cthulhu by Lin Carter, ed.

Miscellany:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Chambers
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/dliterature/authors/chambers/bio/rwcbio1...
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0150432/

I'll be reading in my copy of The Yellow Sign and Other Stories: The Complete Weird Tales of Robert W. Chambers.

I've got it in the excellent anthology H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales.

Ah!

NB The yankeeclassic URL is broken.

>4 elenchus:

Fixed

By the way, the "Miskatonic University" section of the Yankee Classic website is pretty amazing. Wander on in, and you'll get lost for a while...

http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/welcome.htm

>5 semdetenebre:

Speaking of sites to get lost in:

http://www.donaldcorrell.com/road/

(Will post this on the Classic Weird Fiction & Weird Non-Fiction threads as well.)

Dover still offers a print version-
The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories, (Yellow Sign included)
with an Intro by E. F. Bleiler— This edition also includes "The Harbor-Master"... great tale with some "Innsmouth-like" relations...

http://store.doverpublications.com/0486437507.html

"The Yellow Sign" by Robert W. Chambers

DISCUSSION BEGINS WEDNESDAY!

There's a reasonably capable film adaptation of this story too.

And it's collected in The Hastur Cycle.

There is some great imagery in The Yellow Sign, and much of it reminded me of things that came later to the genre. The pasty-faced, pudgy revenant-thing evoked the amorphous surrealism of Ramsey Campbell and Michael Shea. Loved the "eeeeee!" moment when the finger breaks off.

The sequence in which the narrator sees himself lying in the coffin, along with the sinister funeral coach driver peering down at him had a strong pre-echo of the nearly identical sequence in Dreyer's VAMPYR in which the hero has an out of body experience, viewing himself in a coffin as he is carried along, unable to move and eventually gazing up in horror at the old vampire woman peering down at him. The nightmarish funeral coach and driver also reminded me of the same in the movie BURNT OFFERINGS.

These fine touches were leavened somewhat by the rather silly bits of melodrama that would have fit in well with the "women's literature" of the time. At least those moments were brief.

I enjoyed the narrator's darkly humorous cynicism, but I was puzzled by the fact that this self-described man of "no morals" seemed to display nothing but moral character, at least until the final paragraphs when he and Tessie have been corrupted by the ancient book. I think that perhaps Chambers was trying to get an easy character template by using the "dissolute artist", but it really wasn't necessary, although things might have been way more interesting if the narrator truly played the part.

Of course, the tome The King in Yellow plays such a magnificently sinister role in the story, it's easy to see why HPL couldn't resist borrowing the idea for the Necronomicon. The eponymous sigil also works well as the device that the story hangs on. Kind of chilling to think that it was a kind of bait, lying there in the street for some unfortunate to pick up. Or maybe it was specifically meant for Tessie?

The ending is nicely intense, and would have been right at home in the gruesome 1950's horror comics, not to mention providing a bit of "Cool Air". The thing coming up the stairs reminded me of both "The Monkey's Paw" and The Search for Joseph Tully.

I think that perhaps Chambers was more influential that I thought.

This was the shortest story we've read so far. I had read it before, in the context of the whole King in Yellow. On this re-read, I was less impressed with it somehow. The earlier stories in the volume build up the reader's appreciation of the mind-corroding powers of The King in Yellow (i.e. the playtext volume within the fiction, not Chambers' book), so that it "works" without further explanation in the context of "The Yellow Sign." But reading it as a stand-alone, it was not so persuasive.

>12 paradoxosalpha:

I think this story is also the least artfully-done one of the selections so far.

I do think it had a lot of nice horror touches, though, including the idea that the artist's study of Tessie kept changing to show her as being faded, if not outright decayed.

Here's what I wrote the 1st time I read this story, back in January of last year:

"'The Yellow Sign' by Robert W. Chambers: In which we encounter an early use of what was to become a standard Lovecraftian trope: the Evil Grimoire. The last several paragraphs of this story are uniquely disturbing in a way that's difficult to describe - I found myself re-reading them several times, trying (unsuccessfully, I'm afraid) to pin down how Chambers got his effects. A really good one."

(If you like, you can read this in the context of the full review here:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R34DQ6IK65ISU/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm)

Like paradoxosalpha, I was a a little less impressed with it upon re-reading it. I'm trying to figure out whether some of more banal touches in the earlier part of the story (i.e., the romantic subplot between the narrator and Tessie and the "quaint foreigner" character (Thomas)) are put there deliberately to contrast the horrorific ending, to pander to what Chambers' idea of popular taste was, or just sloppy writing.

I am very fond of the passage that goes: "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 music, more awful than death!" As I often find after finishing a really effective HPL tale, I now really want to read the fictional tome that is discussed; it can't be any worse than American Psycho, right? :D

> 14

Yeah, that's the money quote! ("Oh the sin of writing...")

James Blish wrote a short story called "More Light" which contains a text purported to be nearly the full contents of The King in Yellow. I liked it pretty well. According to wikipedia, Lin Carter and Thom Ryng have also tried their hands at manifesting the text.

One of the interesting things about The King in Yellow (despite its clear role as a predecessor to the Necronomicon) is that it isn't a grimoire per se. It's a playtext: a work of fine art rather than a manual of sorcery.

I'd never read this, agree it wasn't as lyrical as other readings we've reviewed but still packed a punch. I was most affected by the reference very early on to "made me think of a coffin worm" (or whatever). I had a visceral reaction to that, didn't see it coming but it didn't strike me as melodramatic, either -- Chambers pushes on past that even as the word is ringing in my ears ....

I'm most impressed with the idea of the book (playtext) and its entry to madness, and the inevitability of things. It was no surprise that the painter would see himself in the coffin previously described him by the model ... but effective.

I am curious to see how the other stories work together.

And of course, I love that I have the Blue Oyster Cult reference now. I wonder, is the Queen in Red the model, after putting on the period costume? Or perhaps something from another of the stories? Or perhaps, a contribution by the lyricist (Melzer? Pearlman?).

> 16

I've always figured that the King in Yellow was per Chambers, and the Queen in Red per John of Patmos, i.e. MYSTERY, Babylon the Great, Mother of Abominations who is the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse.

Don't report this.

What does the Sign look like?

Most recent representations follow this Kevin Ross design:


But I am somewhat persuaded by the argument referenced in this blog for this design, which I find more aesthetically satisfying in any case:

>17 elenchus:

Or a reference to Through the Looking-Glass, perhaps?

> 20

Ah, but perhaps even Carroll with his chessboard Jezebel was adumbrating Her who rules over the kings of the earth, drunken on the blood of the saints?

>19 paradoxosalpha: paradoxosalpha

Why does the Kevin Ross design look like a ?, a !, and a ; sharing a common dot in the center? How does that relate to the story?

>22 bertilak:

Looks like a scorpion to me.

> 22

Dunno. The Propnomicon fellow whose blog post I linked above says that Ross has admitted it is an unsupported aesthetic invention. It has been widely circulated, though. It's used in the film I mentioned in #9, and in some materials for the Call of Cthulhu game, I think. It's what you mostly get on a google image search for "yellow sign."

>24 paradoxosalpha:

How closely does the film follow the story? It is available from Netflix, but its also from Lurker. As far as their HPL collections go, I've seen short films ranging from great to nearly unwatchable.

http://www.lurkerfilms.com/cat/index.html

> 25

I liked it pretty well. Unsurprisingly, it restructures the narrative a lot. The story is mostly told from Tessie Reardon's perspective, and the artist Scott is himself fairly creepy and forbidding from the start. She's a gallery partner interested in landing him as an artist; he's interested in her as a model, sort of. Scott's art is pretty bizarre. It seems he's already read in the forbidden tome.

The film drops some of the story details and adds others, but it manages to capture the fatalistic mood of the original, expanded with the notion that Scott and Reardon are forced to identify with characters in the play.

>26 paradoxosalpha:

Thanks for that. I see it can be streamed, so I'll definitely watch it asap while the story is still freshly in mind. UPDATE - my mistake. No streaming, alas, but I'll add it to my queue.

HPL on The King in Yellow (from a letter to Donald Wandrei ):

"{The King in Yellow is} a series of vaguely connected short tales having as a background a horrible book - abhorred & suppressed - whose perusal brings fright, madness, & spectral tragedy. There is a bit of fin de siècle affectation about the thing, but it's great for all that. The best tale is 'The Yellow Sign'".

>15 paradoxosalpha:

Yeah, I'm reading the Blish story right now (not this very second, but I started it this afternoon). For the curious, you can check it out online here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Sxhiog7Y8EAC&lpg=PR9&dq=more%20light%20...

(In-joke: Blish's pen name was William Atheling, Jr.)

You're quite right about TKIY not being a grimoire, of course. I'd go back & correct my Amazon review but I don't wanna lose my helpful votes. :)

>21 paradoxosalpha:

You're gonna make me get out my study bible, too, aren't you? Bad enough I've already got my dictionary out twice this week because of you. ;)

Bibles, apocrypha, google image searches, RPG arcana, Scrabble dictionaries ... all the hallmarks of a successful group read.

>21 paradoxosalpha:

I've but glanced through random Crowley writings, and added to that a smattering of related material (without regard or even sensitivity to provenance), but a consistent impression I get when dipping into excerpts like that one is that it's similar to the mindset I get when reading Gnostic texts (which I read with a similar lack of thoroughness). It seems above all philosophical, by someone not particularly interested in being philosophical. It is that impression which keeps me interested, keeps me coming back.

>30 elenchus:

We're all about the ancillary resources here at The Weird Tradition. 8)

19 > The Propnomicon mentions an absence of mass insanity among readers of Chamber's book. Can't say I've noticed it myself ...

I do like the inverted torch better than the Rossian version of the Sign.

>33 AndreasJ:

"The Propnomicon mentions an absence of mass insanity among readers of Chamber's book."

The kooky folks over at TV Tropes made a similar observation:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheKingInYellow

>15 paradoxosalpha:

Finished the James Blish story ("More Light") - not too bad. He's actually pretty good at writing in blank verse - who knew?

> 35

I like Blish. Black Easter is a favorite. I've read all of the After Such Knowledge books except for Doctor Mirabilis, which is definitely on my wishlist.

Evidently the Ryng King in Yellow has been staged, but I've never heard of anyone attempting to mount a production of the Blish version.

ETA: I first read "More Light" in the McCaffrey-edited anthology Alchemy and Academe of all places.

>37 artturnerjr:

The main association that comes to mind for me with Blish is all those STAR TREK (original series) tie-in paperbacks that he wrote in the 60s & 70s; I think I had all of them when I was a kid. It was only when I got older that I found out he had a significant career outside of the ST franchise.

Today is the anniversary of Chambers' death. (Yesterday was Machen.) 'Tis the season?

Read as this and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was the most explicit of the stories in The King in Yellow, which in no way detracts from the denouement. It's also interesting to see how Chambers does like to have a central romance to his tales even from this early stage which I assume became his overriding interest later in his literary career at the expense of the dark fantastic.

Man, the first edition was a pretty book:

Thanks for posting the original covers - much appreciated! I borrowed this image - I think it looks really nice up in >1 semdetenebre:!