Robert W. Chambers' Surreally Decadent, Nightmarish Horror Stories
Few writers in the canon of horror fiction are more mystifying or frustrating than the unambitious genius of Robert W. Chambers. Lovecraft famously expressed his stupefaction when he claimed that Chambers had been “equipped with the right brains and education, but wholly out of the habit of using them,” and Frederic Taber Cooper bemoaned that he “exasperates [his readership], because we feel that he might so easily have made it better.” His early writings displayed an unprecedented flair for supernatural horror and the macabre which led E. F. Bleiler to call him the single most important writer in the weird fiction genre between Poe and Lovecraft – and this is no overstatement. Almost no one before 1895 (with the three exceptions of America’s Ambrose Bierce, Ireland’s Fitz-James O’Brien and Germany’s E.T. A. Hoffmann) had so perfectly molded the everyday to the otherworldly, realism to fantasy, the world of mortal concerns to the realm of narcotic nightmares and mystic visions.
His horrors are impossible to peg down, evasive in an almost infuriatingly tantalizing manner, and uniquely visionary. His greatest stories were published in 1895’s The King in Yellow, followed two years later by the barely less brilliant anthology of fantasy and horror, The Maker of Moons and the white-knuckled collection of mystical arcana, The Mystery of Choice. And then it virtually ceased sometime around 1906. There were three more books that contained weird tales: In Search of the Unknown and Police!!!, which both involved Lovecraftian cryptids, and The Tracer of Lost Persons, a popular detective anthology which included an episode of a resurrected Ancient Egyptian dancer. But after these very weak efforts (none of them are worth reading cover-to-cover, though each of them have a handful of outstanding bursts of genius), his imagination seems to have darkened to a dim cinder, then to have expired forever in a thin flare of smoke.
A sometime-painter and illustrator, Chambers was a denizen of New York’s bohemian counterculture when he began writing: “The Yellow Sign” depicts a scene right out of his life as an artist, wherein a gruff painter strikes up an ill-starred romance with the cigarette-smoking, Japanese-robe-wearing prostitute who poses for his nude paintings. The King in Yellow was both influenced by and a commentary on the booming Decadence Movement, and can accurately be called both the subject and the object of that genre – simultaneously satirizing and reveling in the depraved sensuality and morbid hedonism of the so-called “Yellow Nineties.”
The Decadents were artists, musicians, and writers whose work was primarily consumed with a Gothic-inspired fatalism that could be summed up with the phrases “doomed elegance” and “hopeless glamor.” It was a campy movement devoted to cynical hedonism and a carefree fatalism that heralded the imminent consequences of their wanton lifestyles – syphilis, overdoses, scandal, arrest, suicide, destitution, and drug addiction were among the common ends expected of a Decadent whose bohemian existence embraced the YOLO ethos of the early 2010s. You can get an accurate idea of their values and beliefs by reading Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”: tonight we shall dance and drink and make love, for tomorrow we will all be dead.
They were simultaneously sensual and macabre, excessive and stunted. They were consumed with life and death, and obsessed with their well-deserved destruction. If Goths today wore lavish colors and could be infused with the spirits of brooding beatniks, acid-tripping hippies, and a gay pride parade, they might come close to the spirit of the Decadents. Marc Katz summed their self-indulgent, morbid style up by saying “Decadent taste takes some getting used to, though. Writers like Huysmans worked right at the edge of oblivion, with symbols that were ethereal and obscure: serpents twined with human hair; fields of hemlock; succubi; monstrous, purple-draped catafalques; syphilitic flesh; stagnant lakes engulfed by shadows. This wasn’t mere morbidity. The decadents found spoilage to be exhilarating, so long as it could be used to creative advantage.”
It sounds, remarkably enough, very much like the horror stories of Robert W. Chambers. Chambers himself was a member of the Art Nouveau movement – contemporaneous to the Decadents, this school of art was fascinated by supple, feminine beauty, graceful forms, and elegance that took its inspiration from Oriental art, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts movement, and to some extent the Decadents. Chambers could be said to have a foot in both camps – being fascinated with the lavish corruption of the Decadents while being more comfortable with the elegant innocence of the Art Nouveau style, and his stories frequently dally in both traditions. In none of his books is this balance between pure beauty and corrupt sensuality more apparent than in The King in Yellow.
Colors were tremendously important symbols to the aesthetically-obsessed Decadents, and yellow was their personal bade: it stood for everything debauched and forbidden about life – everything that they wanted to sample and gorge. Deeply associated with the Decadence movement, the color yellow was first connected to themes of corruption and impropriety several decades earlier when the fops of Jane Austen’s Regency period wore the garish color to suggest their appetites for the indulgent, grotesque, and shocking.
Later in the century, French books banned in England for their lewd content were at first discreetly packaged in yellow jackets, but when the code was figured out, booksellers even went so far as to wrap relatively tame publications in the lurid amber color because it would increase sales amongst eager buyers. Yellow became a symbol for all that was diseased in the soul, all that was unconventional, contrarian, rebellious, and decadent. If something was “Yellow,” it was gaudy, luscious, vulgar, decayed, infamous, scandalous, poisonous, sensual, leprous, golden, lurid, bawdy, ghastly, seductive, corruptive, grotesque, fantastic, alien, fabulous, alluring, shocking, fascinating, ribald, repulsive, and repellent.
The King in Yellow himself seems to be the personification of these alternatingly attractive and disgusting qualities, and in a more allegorical way appears to represent the way that Creativity and Inspiration are simultaneously the muse and master of artistic types: obsession and mania both give life and take life from intellectuals, hence explaining why those drawn in by the King are nearly all bohemians or artists (a painter, a sculptor, and a writer are three of the potentate’s most notable victims, along with an eccentric avant-garde, a devil-may-care nude model, and a number of New York City tramps) – people who are sensitive to intangible, irrational, internal influences. In each story the victim is prevented from achieving the thing they want most because of their obligations to their new master: the love of woman, the peace of religion, the hope for power and respect. Creativity can be an alluring lover, Chambers warns, but it is also a demanding and sometimes soul-breaking overseer.
The Carcosa Mythos notably borrows many concepts, names, and motifs from Chambers’ two greatest influences: Poe and Bierce. Hastur, Carcosa, and Hali are directly lifted from two of Bierce’s short stories – the pastoral “Haïta the Shepherd” and the far more sinister “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” wherein the ghost (or is it?) of man who had once resided in the long demolished, cyclopean city of Carcosa dreams that he returned to its antediluvian splendor only to realize its destruction in a moment of existential horror. Poe brought over themes of depravation, fatal self-absorption, and the dominion of a malevolent supernatural master (the King in Yellow owes much to the Masque of the Red Death and the Conqueror Worm, both of whom represent oblivion, the meaningless of human endeavors, and the desolation of time – themes which amply summarize what the King in Yellow really is all about).
The dread city/country/region/planet/dimension/state-of-mind (Chambers never settles on one, thankfully) of Carcosa is a kingdom dominated by logical contradictions (which Chambers frequently used to symbolize the supernatural, e.g. the white shadows which recur in the stories in The Mystery of Choice): it has two suns (the sun, frequently worshipped in ancient cultures, is symbolic of God, and Carcosa is too big for one deity), its strange towers seem to challenge Euclidian geometry by twisting their way up, behind, and above the moon – which incidentally is dripping into the cloud-lake of Hali – and its searing bright sky is spangled with black stars.
Carcosa is an anti-civilization, representing the deletion of huamity’s progress, making mockery of all human institutions and cancelling out the pride of mankind (architecture, geometry, astronomy, physics, religion, government, marriage) in a flourish of existential demolition. Carcosa and the King in Yellow are the enemies of human ambition and love, destroying any chance that their worshippers (willing and unwilling) will be happy outside of their devotion to the Yellow King. Indeed, it is hardly a pun to say that the mission of the King in Yellow is to make mankind jaundiced towards all things in Creation other than him: to make all worldly ambitions sicken, die, and yellow under his corruptive influence.
So the potentate of Carcosa can be read several different ways: what is it in life that causes such a loss of hope? The inevitability of death; the alienating power of self-absorption; the self-destruction passions of the artistic temperament; the loss of religious faith; the soul-crushing horror of cosmic existentialism; the depravity of the Decadent movement and its intellectual descendents, and so on. Any of these things could be the King in Yellow – the ruler of rule-less-ness, the leader of the leaderless.
The King in Yellow was his first major work and it was written during his poverty and contentment as a bohemian illustrator, but it also marked his first major success, and within the span of three years he had become an overnight sensation, a toasted member of New York’s literary elite (financial elite, not artistic elite: P. G. Wodehouse despised him, openly lampooning his saccharine style in his “Jeeves” series with the sentimental writer Rosie M. Banks), and his muse was utterly gone. Almost immediately after the publication of the wildly popular King in Yellow, Chambers realized – perhaps by writing “Demoiselle D’Ys” and “The Mask” – that he had a highly commercial knack for writing historical adventure fiction and (most importantly) “shop-girl” romances: profoundly popular tales of unlikely lovers finding their way to one another despite the disparity in their social backgrounds (usually an arrogant but dashing aristocrat falls in love with a working class vixen eking out a living as a retail worker – hence the term “shop-girl” romances).
These doe-eyed, pure-hearted, down-on-their-luck, spunky-but-virtuous, blue-collared beauties oversee the reformation of their barrel-chested, lantern-jawed, tall-dark-and-handsome, masculine suitors, causing them to come in touch with their sensitive sides and to learn to love in spite of their heretofore selfish, patrician lives. The plots were very similar to the most notable rom-coms of the 1980s and 1990s: You’ve Got Mail (especially – the plot is virtually lifted from Chambers: Meg Ryan’s character’s IM handle is even “Shopgirl”), Pretty Woman,