Robert W. Chambers' Decadent, Multi-Dimensional 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 (the exceptions being Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, Fitz-James O’Brien, and E.T. A. Hoffmann) had so perfectly molded the everyday to the otherworldly, or realism to fantasy. He conjured a liminal universe in which the dull world of petty, mortal concerns crossed shadows with an alternate dimension of narcotic nightmares and mystic visions. His horrors are impossible to peg down: tantalizing, evasive, and visionary.

Chambers’ greatest stories in the weird tradition (a sadly small corpus of a dozen short stories, a few poems, two novels, and a half-dozen novelettes) consist of the first five tales in his landmark, 1895 collection The King in Yellow, the title and penultimate stories from his promising, 1896 fantasy anthology, The Maker of Moons, and the first six entries from the following year’s white-knuckled collection of mystical weirdness, The Mystery of Choice.

But shortly after this, his interest in speculative fiction came to an abrupt stop, replaced by a passionate taste for historical romances. Only three more of his many following books that contained something approaching weird tales: In Search of the Unknown, Police!!!, (both involve Lovecraftian cryptids), and The Tracer of Lost Persons (a popular detective anthology which includes one episode where an Egyptian slave girl is hypnotized into suspended animation). Other than these middling collections – none of which 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.

THE YELLOW NINETIES:

THE DECADENT MOVEMENT IN NEW YORK

As a Paris-trained painter and illustrator during the height of the Belle Époque, Chambers frequently rubbed elbows with the era’s bohemian, sexually-expressive counterculture – a movement made infamous by his contemporaries Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley. He made a living as an illustrator for women’s magazines (including Vogue and Life) until 1887, when he began transitioning to writing fiction, and traded Greenwich Village’s opium-scented salons for polite society in bourgeois Brooklyn. “The Yellow Sign” depicts a scene right out of his youthful life as an artist, wherein a gruff painter strikes up an ill-starred romance with the cigarette-smoking prostitute who poses for his erotic 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 sensuality, morbidity, and 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 which was self-consciously haunted by the imminent consequences of its reckless lifestyle: its adherents were hounded by syphilis, overdoses, scandals, arrests, and suicides. Meteoric lives abbreviated by destitution and drug addiction were common fates for committed Decadents. Their mindset, however, was far more fatalistic and self-aware: “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 – obsessed with oblivion. This Victorian subculture combined elements of many 20th and 21st century cultural sects, many of whom can trace their ideological lineage to the 1890s: the gloomy morbidness and moral nihilism of Goths; the lavish colors, fantastical fashion, and sexual relativism of gay pride parades; the brooding intellectualism and artistic experimentation of beatniks; the drug culture and sexual expression of hippies; and the “you-only-live-once,” Ke$ha/fun./LMFAO-fueled party culture of 2010s Greek life. 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, of course, 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 – of course – the Decadents. Chambers could be said to have a foot in both camps – being fascinated with the Decadents’ manic excess 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 morbid sensuality more apparent than in The King in Yellow.

Colors were tremendously important symbols to the aesthetically-obsessed Decadents, and gaudy yellow was their personal badge: it stood for everything debauched and forbidden about life – everything that they yearned to sample and gorge. 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 garish colors – particularly canary yellow and cobalt blue – to suggest their appetites for the indulgent, grotesque, and shocking.

Later in the century, French erotica banned in England were discreetly packaged in dull, yellow jackets. However, when the code was figured out, booksellers even went so far as to wrap relatively tame publications increasingly lurid shades of amber 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 – a book, play, salon, or painting – was “Yellow,” it was considered gaudy, luscious, and vulgar; decayed, infamous, and scandalous; poisonous, sensual, and leprous. “Yellow” conjured ideas of alien things, fantastical things, seductive things, corruptive things. It meant that the content was shocking but fascinating, repellent but alluring. It meant a liminal blur of ideals that rejected labels and contradicted mainstream appetites, weirdly blending the ghastly and grotesque with the delicious and delightful.

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, an eccentric avant-garde, a call-girl nude model, and a number of New York City tramps number his known victims). These, Chambers implies, are 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 solace of faith, the hope for power, love, and respect. Creativity can be an alluring lover, Chambers warns, but it is also a demanding and sometimes soul-breaking overseer. 

INFLUENCES AND IMPACT:

CHAMBERS’ PLACE WITHIN WEIRD HORROR

The Carcosa Mythos notably borrows many concepts, names, and motifs from Chambers’ two greatest influences: Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce. Hastur, Carcosa, and Hali are directly borrowed from two of Bierce’s short stories – the pastoral “Haïta the Shepherd” and the far more sinister “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (wherein a resident of the grand metropolis of Carcosa finds himself wandering through its cyclopean ruins, unaware until the last that he had died thousands of years previously and is a spirit). He also tended to employ mystical themes – out of body experiences, reincarnation, paranormal visions, time slips, alternate dimensions, and psychedelic nightmares, all of which feature in Chambers’ weird fiction. Poe lent Chambers themes of moral depravation, neurotic self-absorption, and existential terror. The King in Yellow himself owes much to the specter 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, and his cretinous Carcosa, are really all about.

The dread realm (city/ country/ region/ planet/ dimension/ state-of-mind?) 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 was considered divine in ancient cultures, and Carcosa is too big for one deity), its strange towers challenge Euclidian geometry by twisting their way up, behind, and above the moon – which is dripping like a ghostly fluid 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 humanity’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. Carcosa’s allegorical meaning can thus be interpreted several different ways: what is it in life that causes people to suffer 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 historical Decadent movement and its intellectual descendants, and so on. Any of these things could be a King in Yellow: a counterintuitive ruler of the unruly, a contrarian leader of the leaderless.   

A BRIEF TOUR OF CHAMBERS’ WRITING CAREER

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 (not universally, however: P. G. Wodehouse despised him, openly lampooning his saccharine style in his “Jeeves and Wooster” series with the sentimental writer Rosie M. Banks). Almost immediately after the publication of the wildly popular King in Yellow, Chambers realized – perhaps through writing “Demoiselle D’Ys” and “The Mask” – that he had a highly marketable knack for writing historical fiction and “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, down-on-their-luck, blue-collared beauties oversee the reformation of their barrel-chested, hardboiled suitors, causing them to come in touch with their sensitive sides despite their patrician upbringings and loner tendencies. The plots were very similar to the most notable rom-coms of the 1980s and 1990s: Pretty Woman, She’s All That, A Walk to Remember, Pretty in Pink, Secretary, An Officer and a Gentleman, Sixteen Candles, and especially the very Chambersian You’ve Got Mail (Meg Ryan’s character’s IM handle is even “Shopgirl”). Whenever a Chambers book came out, it immediately sold off the shelves, even when bookstores were amply stocked: his historical swashbucklers and tawdry “shop-girl” books made him one of America’s most famous authors of the period – and one of the richest. He was more popular than Crane, London, Dreiser, or Hardy, and stood alongside Mark Twain, James Whitcomb Riley, and Henry James as a nationally recognized literary personality.

In terms of their modern literary descendants, his “shop-girl” novels were the equivalents of the Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey series or the steamy “BookTok” romances of the 2020s: while ubiquitously popular, they were critically panned as smutty, inartistic, indulgent, and ridiculously sentimental. Chambers’ books were once so popular and commonplace that they sold for next to nothing and were used as doorstops, but are now exceedingly rare and yet little desired – a passing literary footnote from the Gilded Age. Most of his books went out of print as soon as a new one came out – made immediately outdated and irrelevant by the advent of its successor.

Unsurprisingly, an author who could erase the memory of his own books from the collective memory of his readership – merely by publishing a new one – has been rendered largely forgotten in the century since his death. Forgotten for “shop-girl” romances, at least: Chambers’ love stories made him wealthy and famous, but the only thing saving his memory from utter oblivion is a single, fecund, three year period of his life (1895 – 1897) when he wrote just over a dozen supernatural tales, whose tantalizing imaginative scope have made him one of the most mysterious (and to some, most disappointing) geniuses of weird fiction.

CONJURING CARCOSA:

THE ERA OF WEIRD FICTION (1895 – 1907)

Chambers’ first and most notable collection of stories was, of course, The King in Yellow: his masterpiece and current claim to fame. These tales are heavily influenced by Poe and Bierce – laden with morally grey characters, unreliable narration, insanity, obsessions, murder, body horror, and otherworldly terrors – and capably pick up where they left off in the train of American fantasy and horror. Eventually this train of influence would extend to Lovecraft, Ashton Smith, Derleth, Bloch, Campbell, King, and Gaiman, all of whom cited Chambers as a substantial inspiration. The King in Yellow is, of course, most notable for the first four stories which overtly feature the eponymous play – a madness-inducing tome modelled closely on Oscar Wilde’s scandalous Salome.

These four tales are seasoned with weird suggestions of multi-dimensionality, threats from evil cults staffed with ghoulish zombies, along with more mystical elements of precognition and reincarnation. Michelle White notes that:

“Chambers’ horror tales aren’t tentacley like Lovecraft’s, but the emphasis on the unknowable and the madness it inspires is definitely there. The weirdest – and best – short stories in the original text of The King in Yellow typically feature artists losing their minds, often in connection to the mysterious titular figure… All of this happens with little dialogue, and big, brash musical notes dominating several panels. It’s all capped off by the most visually spectacular moment in the collection, set down with bright, bleeding colours. Given what’s come before – that is, a whole lotta weird, elegantly rendered – this is about as fitting a conclusion as you could ask for. And if you stand back and squint, the collection as a whole feels unified in intention and mood. The esotericism of Chambers’ narrative was always going to make it a bumpy ride in terms of plot.”

The main four entries are followed by a haunting ghost story that transcends time (“Demoiselle D’Ys”), an eerie collection of prose poems (“The Prophets’ Paradise”), and a very disturbing episode wherein a madman befriends a woman’s cat and follows it back to the house of its mistress, where he discovers her corpse in bed (“The Street of the Four Winds”). Published in 1895, The King in Yellow made Chambers’ reputation and earned him the acclaim of critics as well as the public. Unsurprisingly, his book received similar treatment to eponymous play: its stories of mad bohemians, love triangles, blasphemies, necrophilia, zombies, evil dimensions, and unrestrained decadence earned it a scandalous reputation with mainstream society. The progressive literary salons in New York and London raved over it, however, comparing it favorably to Bierce and Poe, and elevating Chambers’ to a household name.

The next year he made a second contribution to the genre: a novella called The Maker of Moons – an adventurous fantasy piece which presages Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and especially “The Whisperer in the Darkness” – about a man who falls in love with a woman from another dimension. While her mystical Yian is more like Coleridge’s Xanadu than the King in Yellow’s Dread Carcosa, it is not without eldritch sea monsters, demonic crabs, or scheming cults. In short, it is one of the most Lovecraftian stories that Lovecraft never wrote. The following year he produced his most mystical anthology yet, The Mystery of Choice, a collection of Biercian tales of murders, mysteries, and hauntings – complete with Satanic zombie priests, murderous small-town rivalries, deathbed hallucinations, ghostly reunions with dead lovers, cryptids, and alternate dimensions. This was Chambers’ high-water mark, but after 1906, he never again devoted his energies to creating fine speculative fiction.

There were very occasional spats of it in the following years: In Search of the Unknown is a series of goofy chases after cryptids, most notable among which is “The Harbor-Master,” whose titular amphibian, a libidinous humanoid, inspired “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and the Creature of the Black Lagoon. The similarly-themed Police!!! (whose title clashes with the utterly cheesy nature of its contents) only generated “Un Peu d’Amour,” wherein giant worms burrow through the New York countryside – a much tamer forerunner to Tremors. Both of those anthologies have protagonists who are smitten by a different Gibson Girl in each story (each one a shameless but irresistible coquette), and in each story their crushes are stolen away by more cunning men. Awww, shucks...

There is one fantastical episode in The Tracer of Lost Persons – a detective novel about a sleuth who finds long lost loves and the like – wherein a man falls in love with the dormant body of an Egyptian slave girl which has been staving off death through hypnosis for thousands of years. Finally, in 1907 he came out with the collection The Tree of Heaven, which has supernatural elements to it to be sure, but the stories are almost solely of a light, sentimental nature, and none merit inclusion in this anthology. His brilliant gift for writing speculative fiction was politely shelved by the time he turned forty. From this point on, for better or worse, his focus was on romance and historical fiction.

Of the two-and-a-half dozen or so supernatural stories that Chambers wrote, I have culled it down to fifteen need-to-reads which I’ve organized into three thematic clusters. The first was a natural decision: The King in Yellow Mythos. These are the first four stories in the eponymous 1895 anthology which made Chambers’ reputation and most heavily influenced Lovecraft and his disciples: “The Repairer of Reputations,” “The Mask,” “In the Court of the Dragon,” and “The Yellow Sign,” which follows the tumultuous relationships of several inter-related bohemians in New York and Paris whose lives are powerfully effected – and often utterly ruined – by reading “The King in Yellow,” which haunts their hopes with the specters of paranoid insanity and existential awe.

The next division is made up of  “Weird Fiction and Fantasy” – stories that Chambers wrote which blur the lines between horror, science fiction, magic, fantasy, and adventure. Most notable among them is the novella “The Maker of Moons” – perhaps Chambers’ greatest accomplishment outside of The King in Yellow. There is also the hypnotic and discombobulating “Prophets’ Paradise” (which may give you an idea of what “The King in Yellow” reads like), the creepy cryptid tales, “The Harbor-Master,” the Bierce-inspired “Key to Grief,” whose protagonist escapes a lynch mob and builds a life on a secluded island with a primitive woman, and Egyptological mystery-romance, “The Tomb of Samaris.”

The final selection might surprise some readers who did not know that Chambers was a writer of classic ghost stories in the Late Victorian tradition. Although they lack the savagery of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, they take their gloomy, often romantic cue from the era’s great female supernaturalists (particularly Edith Nesbit, Mary E. Braddon, and Margaret Oliphant) whose ghosts are shadows of trauma far more than objects of terror. Included here are stories about roaming ghosts in search of their lost loves (“The Bridal Pair,” “A Pleasant Evening,”), haunted consciences (“Passeur”), and rival butterfly collectors driven to murder (“The Purple Emperor”). Of particular note are “The Messenger” (Chambers’ Gothic masterpiece about the zombie-ghost of a Satanic priest) and “Demoiselle D’Ys” (from The King in Yellow – which involves a man either stepping into another dimension, remembering a previous reincarnation, time-travelling, or encountering a confused ghost – you be the judge).

THE LEGACY OF LOST CARCOSA

The ghastly garden of Chambers’ disappointingly brief career as a horror writer is more dominated by suggestive buds than by fruitful blooms. Some of his flowers grew to magnificent fruition, while some became stunted halfway through their cycle and died prematurely. Others should never have gone to seed. As such, his oeuvre is a patchwork of classic hits and embarrassing misses.

Through it all, however – in spite of all his many shortcomings – Chambers shines as a powerful writer: even his worst stories are delicious feasts of prose. His writing is rich and intoxicating, dominated by vivid visuals and striking wordplay; we are frequently reminded that behind it all, Chambers was always painter at heart. While elements of Chambers’ professional career have exasperated and even disgusted fans of his horror fiction, he deserves unqualified praise for his influence on the genre and for his profoundly unique vision.

Aside from Henry James and Ambrose Bierce, he was the first great American supernatural writer to appear in print since the Civil War, and in the genre of weird fiction, he was the most original writer since Hoffmann and Poe, making his debut ahead of Hodgson, Onions, and Blackwood. He was in the vanguard of the Golden Age of Weird Fiction (what S. T. Joshi called “Haute Weird”) – the epoch associated by Lovecraft, though it was instigated by the mid-90s publications of The King in Yellow, The Great God Pan, and Dracula. Lovecraft’s mythos in particular owes an extreme debt to Chambers: “The Maker of Moons,” “The Harbor-Master,” “The Messenger,” and the entirety of the Carcosan Mythos were reworked into Lovecraft’s later works. Even though his Necronomicon predated his discovery of Chambers, he pays homage to The King in Yellow by writing that “[it] was from rumours of [The Necronomicon] (of which relatively few of the general public know) that R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel The King in Yellow.”

More recently, his legacy has been resurrected by the HBO series, True Detective, where a serial killer of the Hildred Castaigne variety pledges his allegiance to the cult of the King in Yellow. His influence is easy to note in modern masters like Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, T.E.D. Klein, Ramsey Campbell, and Lin Carter. Karl Edward Wagner, James Blish, Robert M. Price, and Charles Stross have all referenced him in their works, and several Carcosan graphic novels have been published, bringing Chambers’ mythos to new generations of readers. In his own introduction to Chambers’ collected weird fiction, S.T. Joshi closes with a meditation on his legacy which perfectly sums up Chambers’ shaky relationship with his readers:

“Chambers was an intellectual dilettante, and wrote whatever came to mind; we are fortunate that he now and again turned his careless and free-flowing pen to the creation of a few weird tales of transcendent beauty and horror.”

Indeed, we may begrudge Chambers for selling out, for writing fluff, and for watering down some stories which had the potential to be masterpieces, but for what he did give us, we can begrudge him nothing – we can only thank him.

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