The late 1800’s were host to a few pieces of literature that would forever alter the way readers see the color yellow. The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, saw publication in 1892, and focused on a wife who obsesses with yellow wallpaper, driving herself mad. As creepy as this story is, it is mostly known today as an important work of feminist literature. It was three years later, in 1895, when Robert Chambers’ collection The King in Yellow would see publication, taking the connect...

By turns pedestrian and incoherent, this book is all the more irritating because it had the potential to be wonderful. I would have rated it two stars except for the fact that the book is riddled with errors - both typographical and grammatical. Honestly, how hard is it to proofread?!

Fairly uneven collection but overall enjoyable. I liked some of the more experimental stories and I thought many of them captured the feeling of the source material. Gemma Files' story was a real standout for me. Some of the stories were a bit repetitive but I suppose that's the risk in compiling such a specific anthology. Overall though I recommend to fans of cosmic horror...definitely more good than bad

Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Starsby Gemma FilesReview:Have you heard the story?You know about The king in Yellow, and what happened to some inhabitants of Carcosa?Was it a “primary phobia about the sea”?Folklore?There is a dig.Seeking out answers, skeletons laid out, things aligning, connections being made and answers arising.An inquisitive and visceral compelling constructed work.Funeral Rock and Carcosa City awaits.Maybe this tale will have you seek out another, and follow the yellow bric...

A SEASON IN CARCOSA is a real-real cute anthology of short stories. Y’all should read it, unless you are like me, and you are completely unfamiliar with the works of a fellow named Robert W. Chambers. Or perhaps, especially if you are like me, and you are completely unfamiliar with the works of a fellow named Robert W. Chambers. I can’t decide.I love Robin Spriggs’s “Salvation in Yellow.” This story is about a gal living in a nightmare house that’s totally haunted by Daddy and Jesus, which I thi...

A little uneven. I liked a fair number of the collected stories, but I'm not certain yet if I loved any. A lot strayed into bizarrely surreal territory, which I expected from a King In Yellow collection, and while there are a few I wouldn't bother to reread, I'm not sure I'd say any were outright bad.As others have pointed out, a few stories could have used some more thorough editing. One in particular was just overflowing with misspellings and other errors that brought the story to the very edg...

Night fell as I ascended the burnished staircase to the Odd Fellows Hall. No longer a meeting place, the hall’s upstairs ballrooms were rented for ballet classes and theatrical experiments. In smaller rooms, narrow as cubbyholes, artists, performers, and practitioners of occult sciences resided as quietly as mice.I searched every room, muttering apologies along the way. In one room a woman located a beating heart wrapped in a scarf inside a mahogany chest of drawers. In another a painter depicte...

A few highly unusual and exceptionally well written pieces in this collection - the remainder are largely similar and therefore almost impossible to tell apart. An even smaller quantity of stories were gratifying and worth the labor it took to try making any kind of sense of them. Not that I demand logic in my fiction, but I do need SOMETHING to latch on to and chase, as well as ultimately reminisce on. I like for horror to punch me in the face with an invisible brick, like du Maurier’s Don’t Lo...

In the 1938 Memorial Edition of Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, Rupert Hughes suggests that if we remove Chambers from the literary landscape, “a great and brilliant life would be left without presentation; a swarm of men and women as typical of our time as any other groups, and living our life to the full, would be entirely omitted from the literary parade.” Hughes assures us that the work of Robert Chambers will survive, “unless posterity shall be too deeply involved in its own problem...

This is one of the most significant multi-author anthologies of recent years. A wonderful, concentrated batch of intoxicating goodness, sure to please readers of weird fiction and horror. Every anthology includes pieces that don't work for all readers. All too often, the reader must be satisfied with just a few strong stories in the mix. In this case, the intelligent and provocative bullseyes greatly outnumber the few misses. Some of the highlights come from reliable writers such as Laird Barron...

I’ve been meaning to dig into this for years, and one of my goals for 2020 is to pick up some of those older anthologies from my TBR pile and move them to a permanent place of honor or send them to a home that will love them more. This one stays. I love Chambers’ work and the mythos of the King in Yellow has a special place in my heart. “My Voice Is Dead” by Joel Lane is a perfect way to usher us into this world where everything is dark and tinted yellow. It sets us up for everything that is to

Sometimes reading anthologies of certain subjects are a mixed bag. They tend to say too much about the subject and it tends to feel like watching the DVD extras of your favorite movie where they explain how that movie was made and it takes away the "magic" or "mystery".This book does not do that.Joe Pulver has done an amazing job adding on the mystery and magic to Chamber's work. The stories in here run the gamut from simple to the baroque to the bizarre. There are too many in here to call my fa...

Joseph S. Pulver Sr., a Robert W. Chambers scholar, aficionado, and prolific and acclaimed 'Yellow' author in his own right, has assembled tales and poems that run the gamut of weird, horrifying, personal, experimental, and all just downright beautiful that will remain essential reading for Weird Fiction fans for years to come.Some stories are directly pulled from Robert W. Chamber's The King in Yellow, while some simply riff on themes and ideas, creating something totally unique. While there is...

This was, I think, the first collection of short stories published that are exclusively about Chamber's "The King in Yellow," without any Lovecraft. It sort of sat there on Amazon for a few years until the writer of "True Detective" said it was an inspiration for season 1. Now there's other short story collections of this type rolling out.Hopefully they'll be much better. I try to give self-published or small press books some leeway on copyediting mistakes, but man, there were a lot of them. The...

More like 1.5 or 1.75, but I can't bear to round the rating up to 2 stars.It was incredibly tough to get into this anthology. I failed to get 25 pages in three times. The Introduction is not very good and the book is completely riddled with typos. I was put off by the lack of author bios and their names being absent from the top of the page.Many of the stories were trying too hard (and failing) to evoke mystery and poetry, atmosphere and surreality (is that even a word?).There were some stand ou...

A fine collection of weird fiction and poetry based on the Hastur/King in Yellow mythos of Robert W. Chambers. Now if you don’t know what the hell is the Hastur/King in Yellow mythos is, then this is NOT the book to you. Read some Chambers first, see if you dig that, then come back to this one and not only will you ‘get it’ but you should enjoy the hell out of it. If you are already familiar with work of Chambers, and especially if you’re a fan of his brand of cosmic dread, then you are the targ...

In the late 19th Century, Robert W. Chambers wrote a couple of weird fiction short stories, collected in a book titled _The King in Yellow_. In the universe of these stories, there is a two act play, titled _The King in Yellow_ which has a deleterious effect on those who read it.Those stories are in the public domain. While the current average goodreads rating for those stories is around 4 stars, I gave it 3. Nevertheless, those stories have their creepy moments, and has had an influence on horr...

A Season in Carcosa is an exceptionally well-edited tribute anthology in honor of Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories, a story cycle about an accursed play, set in "dim Carcosa," which, when merely read (never staged!), leaves madness and chaos in its wake. Chambers' "KiY" stories, though there are only five, left a small but persistent imprint on the weird, influencing Lovecraft, to start with, whose Necronomicon owes not a little to that "cursed book"-within-a-book

Chilling stories by Robin Spriggs, Kristin Prevallet, and Richard Gavin.

Not a lot to say, the stories were nearly all more similar to teasers or snippets than fully fleshed out, and Laird Barron's usual brilliance on display in "D T" is the only reason this collection isn't a zero.