Evadare Volney's Blog - Posts Tagged "edgar-allan-poe"

The King in Yellow Rises [Annotated] [Illustrated] [Translated]: The Lost Book of Carcosa by Charles Baudelaire

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The TV series True Detective brought a revival of interest in the King In Yellow mythos, and this eerie little book is a great handy source to link not only all Robert W Chambers stories that involve the sinister play, the Yellow Sign, and the lost city of Carcosa, but a lot of his sources and inspirations as well, most directly Ambrose Bierce. And while Baudelaire's poem and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper, and the Lord Dunsany tales aren't properly part of the mythos, it's not a reach to see why they're included here, for cultural context of nothing else - and if Poe's The Masque of the Red Death didn't inspire RWC at least a little bit, I'll eat my...um...mask. It's a pity the relevant stories of HP Lovecraft can't be included here for copyright reasons (and the editor/translator explains which stories you need to read in the afterward essay anyway), but the star I'd have docked for missing them is restored by the inclusion of the decadent, surrealistic, nightmarish illustrations, which bring this collection up to a new level.



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