They always say you should write what you know, but The King In Yellow is a great example of why that is, in certain cases, terrible advice.
A book of ten short stories published at the end of the 19th century, The King In Yellow opens with a suite of tales that would help mold weird and macabre fiction for decades to come. Lovecraft read them. Bram Stoker read them. Even if they aren't remembered directly by that many readers, their impact is palpable.
The first story in particular, “The Repairer of Reputations,” is a force to be reckoned with. It reminded me a little of Phillip K Dick, not in style or content, but it the sheer overflowing of ideas. It takes place in an imagined future 1920s, but rather than making the setting the focus of the plot, it is almost incidental. It is in this story that we first hear mention of the eponymous King in Yellow, a play of such rhetorical power that reading it drives people mad (its influence as a literary device on Lovecraft's Necronomicon is indisputable). But this, too, is not truly core to the plot, which hinges on an unreliable narrator and his relationship with an eccentric old hermit, who has cast him in a atrangexdelusion of American dynasties.
The next three stories all share a common mythos despite varying in setting and style somewhat, and the first half rounds out with a ghost story that, while not especially original, is still engaging and well told.
It's in the second half that things take a turn. The next couple of stories become less macabre than simply odd, their weird fiction trappings conveyed more in atmosphere than plot. And then the last vestiges of the paranormal trappingsfall away, and we get stories that are mere slices of life in turn of the century Paris. “The Street of the First Shell” at least has some literary richness, focusing on the travails of the idealistic bohemian subculture in a besieged Paris during the Prussian War. At this point we've heard at least four stories about American painters in Paris—of which Robert Chambers was himself one—but each one has had something else to offer, some unique spin or take.
And then there's “The Street of Our Lady of the Fields.” I've never had a story in an otherwise solid collection squander so much of my good will. I just finished reading it and I couldn't tell you who the characters were or what happened, while I could chart out “The Repairer of Reputations” from memory almost line by line. Nothing whatsoever happens, and the trope of the American abroad, worn thin already, has absolutely nothing else to lean on, and so falls apart. The prose remains rich and eloquent, but good writing can only get you so far if the characters are bland and the story’s a dud, and I’m afriad both of these were the case here. The last story further tread this ground, though with a bit of intrigue to carry the reader along.
While uneven, the book still deserves its place in the proto-horror canon, if only for the first few stories, which are worth the price of admission.