The King in Yellow

Content Warning: This section of the guide quotes outdated and offensive language around mental health conditions and suicide as well as discussing stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health.

The King in Yellow is a fictional play read by several characters in the stories. This play (and the images associated with it) is the most prominent motif in the first half of the book. A rumor is embedded in the first story: that anyone who reads it is driven “mad” by the experience. The exact content of the play is left vague and mysterious: The play is only partly revealed through quotations and references made by the characters.

The first detailed description of the play comes from Castaigne in “The Repairer of Reputations,” who says:

for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow (3).