The King in Yellow

Cheap magazine style print not a regular paperback as I expected.

Recommend for all the readers, something new for the library

beautiful cover butmake sure to check out the dimensions on this thingits not a small and thick pocket bookits more of a coloring book size or school manual...and also really flabby too flabby to be honest

I really enjoyed the book, should have checked the size though.

Reading this collection of short stories, I sincerely feel like I would've greatly enjoyed having coffee and a chat with the author - the first half of the book does indeed involve a King, dressed in Yellow, about whomst a stage play exists that has a tendency to send sensitive artistic types into violent (and sometimes murderous) fits upon exposure, and all these tales of macabre soliloquies and swooning are delightfully moody. However, about halfway through the book an interesting bait and switch happens: as it turns out, Robert W. Chambers also enjoyed writing goofy little vignettes about University students in Revolution-era Paris falling in love and occasionally getting their hearts broken. The tonal shift was so sudden that I spent many of these stories waiting for the other cosmic horror shoe to drop before realizing that there was no other shoe, and no evil haunted play, just a bunch of dumb lovable kids trying to figure themselves out in a foreign country while on the cusp of true adulthood. They're charming little tonics to soothe the mind after all the misery in the first half and really paint an interesting picture of the author's personality.