King in Yellow (Version 2) - Free Audiobook

The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories by the American writer Robert W. Chambers, published in 1895. Its best-known pieces share a single unsettling idea: a play, also called The King in Yellow, whose second act is said to drive readers to madness or despair. The play itself is never shown in full. Instead, Chambers offers scattered fragments and allusions to a strange place called Carcosa, to a figure named Hastur and to the Yellow Sign, and lets the reader's imagination do the rest.

The opening stories move between a slightly distorted near-future New York and the studios of Paris, following artists, soldiers and dreamers whose lives are bent out of shape once the play or its symbols cross their path. Narrators are often unreliable, and the line between delusion and real horror stays deliberately blurred. Later in the book the tone shifts toward lighter, romantic tales of art students in Paris, which shows another side of Chambers' writing.

The weird stories had a long afterlife. H. P. Lovecraft admired them and borrowed their imagery, and the book found new readers after its references appeared in modern television and games. Listeners who enjoy early cosmic horror, Gothic atmosphere or fiction that suggests more than it explains will find plenty here.