The King in Yellow

For fans of HBO’s True Detective, here is the complete, original text of The King in Yellow, a collection of ten Victorian-era short stories that includes some of the most important and defining works in the genre of weird fiction.

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa

With these opening lines, Robert W. Chambers introduces readers to The King in Yellow, a fictional play referred to but never fully seen in four of the stories included here: The Repairer of Reputations, The Mask, In the Court of the Dragon, and The Yellow Sign. Set in the dark and sinister world of Carcosa, the play drives all who encounter it to madness and despair, though we, as readers, only glimpse its unspeakable horrors.

This seminal collection of short stories has captured the imaginations of generations of readers, including H. P. Lovecraft, who used The King in Yellow as inspiration for the Necronomicon, the fiction-within-a-fiction at the heart of his own genre-defining Cthulu Mythos. More than a century later, The King in Yellow continues to wield remarkable influence in popular culture, and has experienced a resurgence in popularity as a key literary reference in HBO’s hit dramatic series True Detective.