2. The King in Yellow

By Robert W. Chambers

Saw this hardcover edition while browsing Walden Pond Books in   Oakland.  We (the Purves-Brebner clan) were in the area to pick up a Christmas tree at Brent's near the Grand Lake Theatre and had also consumed some delicious Asian-inspired pastries at Bake Sum.

So yes, I saw The King in Yellow and got Olman to pick it up for me as a Xmas present.  I also found a used copy of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which happened to be on Olman's list.  Too bad for him though, finders keepers!
I first heard about The King in Yellow as a literary influence on True Detective S1, and it's been on my list ever since.  

Recently, I acquired a HP Lovecraft box set under purely consumeristic circumstances. I was taking advantage of Black Friday sales to do some early Xmas shopping and Indigo had a sale on Kpop albums, which is what my daughter is into collecting now.  Albums qualify for shipping, but I needed another $12 to reach the minimum amount for free shipping.  I saw that certain paperback box sets were half price so I got a HP Lovecraft box set for only $12.50 and as a minor horror buff, I've always been curious about his work.  Anyway, I was aware that author Robert Chambers was an early influence on Lovecraft, so I thought it was a nice coincidence when I saw this nice Pushkin Press edition from 2017 at Walden Books.

The King in Yellow was my first completed book in 2026 (not counting The Antifa Comic Book) and I was able to finish it within a few days.  It's really a collection of four short stories.  The original 1895 publication contained more stories but apparently it's just the first four that are thematically connected by a cursed play called 'The King in Yellow' which somehow ends up in the hands of various characters. When someone reads the second act, terrible things befall them, ie. they start losing touch with reality and become haunted by a ruined, mythical city called Carcosa, unwittingly serving a cult-like deity known only as Hastur, the Yellow King.  Apparently, the world of Carcosa was inspired by Ambrose Pierce. 

The first and probably best story was "The Repairer of Reputations".  The setting is a dystopic 1920s America that has become quite militaristic and Randian (before Ayn Rand and the military-industrial complex came about).  People of Jewish descent and other undesirable foreigners have been deported and a state has been established for African-Americans. The narrator, Hildred Castaigne, observes the official opening of a "Lethal Chambers" at a public park in Manhattan, for anyone who wants to painlessly end their life so as not be a burden on society.  We soon learn that our dear Hildred is not quite right in the head.  Not only had he suffered a head injury from a fall, he had also been committed for a period of time inside an asylum.  At some point he had also read "The King in Yellow" and often visits the creepy Repairer himself, a Yellow King devotee who happens to live above the store that's run by the father of his brother's fiancée.  I like the part when Hildred thought he was alone inside his shabby apartment admiring himself in mirror as he wore his golden crown but when his brother came upon him, he was really just wearing a cheap, dime-store trinket. The reader is basically plunged inside the unraveling mind of a man who's becoming more and more paranoid and deranged until he commits a terrible act.

As a Goodreads reviewer wrote: it is a bracing and imaginative bit of darkness on the page and, to me at least, quite wonderful. the style is so breezy, the pacing so brisk, the imagination so fertile and so oddly modern, the experience was pure pleasure. it is hard to believe that this story was written over a 100 years ago.

The next story, "The Mask", was ok and probably my least favourite as it was more melo-dramatic than creepy or chilling.  It takes place in Paris and involves a love triangle between young painter named Alec, a sculptor and would-be alchemist named Boris, and their love interest, Genevieve.  Boris has discovered or created a magical solution that can transform any organic object or living thing into lightly veined white marble.  It's unclear how the golden liquid came about, but it's strongly implied that it came from the same world that brought about "The King in Yellow".  Tragedy soon befalls the hapless trio. 

Next was "In the Court of the Dragon", also set in Paris, about a man pursued by a sinister church organist who is after his soul.  That pretty much sums up what is probably the shortest of the four stories and the least developed.

Last was "The Yellow Sign" and we're back in Manhattan (Greenwich Village) in "contemporary" times, ie. the 1890s. This time, an artist and his model are troubled by a sinister churchyard watchman who resembles a "plump white grave-worm".  Tessie keeps having the same recurring dream where she sees Scott lying inside a funeral casket being taken away by a horse-drawn carriage.  As their relationship develops, Tessie gives Scott "a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or a letter in gold", which she happened to find one day near Battery Park.  Then soon after, Scott finds The King in Yellow in his collection, "a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase." It is, inexplicably, "The King in Yellow", a book he has studiously avoided: "If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages."

So we have come full circle, and our two young lovers are doomed towards a sad demise. This wiki site has a good plot summary.

The King in Yellow collection was an enjoyable read.  I did not expect it to be so readable.  TBH, I expected it to be less accessible and weirder, because after all, The King in Yellow is supposedly a classic example of weird fiction.  The stories were macabre in tone, full of creeping dread and gothic romanticism, with characters who are often artists or decadents, inhabitants of the demi-monde.  But the supernatural or occult references were very subtle and minimal.  This was not a bad thing, just not what I expected.  Still, very glad I read this.
 

5. House of Leaves

By Mark Z. Danielewski

I requested Hubs to get me House of Leaves last Xmas and got the Remastered Full Color Edition (2000).  Apparently, the Remastered edition gives a “fuller” experience and adds another layer of meaning.   

 

In Remastered Full Color Edition edition:

• Any iteration of the word "house" appears in blue, even in the blurbs section and the publication page where it mentions “Random House, Inc."
• The word "minotaur" and all crossed-out passages appear in red.
• There is one line written in purple, which is important because of what the color implies for the story.
• The pictures in the appendices are full color.
• There's a bit in the book written in braille with a translation in the footnotes.

 

In the two-color edition (with the doorknob cover):

• EITHER "house" appears in blue OR "minotaur"/crossed out passages appear in red. One or the other, not both. It's a gamble which you'll get.
• The line that is purple in the full color is not written in purple.
• The braille bit doesn't appear.
• The pictures in the appendices might be color or they might be black and white. Again, it's a gamble.

 

I’ve been curious about House of Leaves for some years, but its ambitious density and heft had seemed somewhat daunting.  As I delved more into horror fiction over the past few years, it was becoming apparent that House of Leaves was required reading if I was to be a true fan of the genre.  It’s got a bit of everything:  a 'haunted' house, super-natural horror, mystery, psychological thriller, unreliable narrator(s), survival labyrinth horror(?)… there’s even a love story.

 

If you get past the multi-layered experimental meta-fiction and epistolary complexity, there’s a very simple story at heart.  Johnny Truant, a disaffected 25 yr old in LA, discovers a chest full of scribbled notes and an unfinished manuscript left by his friend’s blind and elderly neighbour, Zampanò, who died of mysterious circumstances.  The manuscript focuses on "The Navidson Record", a documentary film directed by acclaimed photojournalist, Will Navidson.

 

"The Navidson Record" documents how Navidson and his family move into their new home in the Virginia suburbs.  They soon discover that their house is not normal, at least physically.  It started off as a puzzle - why was there a discrepancy of 3/4 of an inch between the inside and outside measurements of the house?  This seemingly small difference triggers Navidson's obsessive tendencies to find an explanation for these spatial discrepancies and sets in motion a series of increasingly unsettling events. The house then exhibits further anomalies, like a closet appearing where there was previously a blank wall.  A door appears in the living room revealing a dark and vast liminal space that is not physically possible if you stand outside the house.  When the house reveals itself to contain a seemingly endless labyrinth, Navidson contacts his estranged brother Tom and an old friend Reson to mount an exploration of its hidden dimensions. Navidson's obsession with the labyrinth leads him and his family into increasingly terrifying situations.

 

Navidson, Tom and Reston soon realize they are way in over their heads when the walls of the labyrinth start to shift and they barely find their way back “home” inside the “normal” confines of the house.  They hire a professional explorer, Holloway Roberts, and his two assistants, Kirby “Wax” Hook and Jed Leeder to mount a proper expedition armed with gear and camera equipment.  Needless to say, the expedition goes awry as the men get lost and Holloway goes crazy, a la Jack Torrance and goes on a bit of a rampage. 

 

House of Leaves is a bit of a sausage fest, but there are some sections devoted to Navidson’s long-time partner Karen and their strained relationship.

 

Zampanò's claims that "The Navidson Record" :

became an American cultural phenomenon upon its theatrical release in 1993, generating volumes of multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture. In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film. Zampanò discusses not only Navidson's filmmaking techniques, but also segues into topics such as photography, architecture, Biblical studies, and radiometric dating, often interspersing overwhelmingly esoteric tangents, several of which devolve into nonsensical, page-long lists of only superficially relevant items. Though many of the academic works Zampanò cites appear to analyze The Navidson Record purely as a work of found-footage horror fiction, Zampanò's writing remains adamant as to its authenticity.

(from Wikipedia)

It should be noted that in the flyleaf, House of Leaves is authored by Zampanò with the Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant.  There’s a contrast in mood and style between the Navidson and Johnny Truant sections.  There are the obvious tonal differences between the strained domesticity inside the house on Ash Tree Lane Virginia (portrayed via various media) versus Zampanò's dry academic writing style versus the slacker lifestyle of an assistant tattooist in an urban metropolis. 

 

Johnny Truant reminded me of the protagonist in The Cipher.  Within Nicholas, there already existed an existential emptiness when he came upon The Funhole in the dingey basement of his apartment building.  Nicholas hopelessly pined after the cold-hearted Nakota while Truant kept hooking up with Zampanò’s former readers and they all happen to be physically attractive.  Johnny became obsessed with Zampanò’s manuscript soon after he discovered the box full of his notebooks.  As he immersed himself in Zampanò’s world, it was akin to going down a rabbit hole, or the Funhole for Nicholas.  Both characters began to change (for the worse) as their obsession started taking over their lives, exerting a destructive toll on their mental and physically health.  

 

The book interweaves the text written by Zampanò and Truant.  There's also a third party, the “Editors”.  Visually and structurally, there's intertextual playfulness and cleverness aplenty.  It also plays heavily with footnotes.  Sometimes the footnotes take over the pages and there are even footnotes for the footnotes.

 

With an ever-present tension between what was supposed to real or fabricated, it seemed a given that the author must create a book where the text reflected this interplay, as well as the impossibility of the house on Ash Tree Lane.  At certain points, the text became moving pieces.  Some pages had only a few sentences while a page was completely blank except for one innocuous word.  When the labyrinth suddenly expanded, the text expanded with it, or contracted, etc.  At another point, you had to read the text backwards.  It was pretty neat.

In terms of conventional genres, there were elements of horror, mystery, and psychological thriller.  Most of that narrative was found in "The Navidson Record" (the text by Zampanò).  For me, those sections about the house on Ash Tree Lane were the most riveting parts from House of Leaves.  

 

I don’t think I’m alone in that the Truant sections were the least-liked in House of Leaves.  In one forum, a reader asked if they could skip over some of the more indulgent passages and someone else said that you should really try to stick through it and read everything. 

 

The narrative that was woven through "The Navidson Record" was a mixed bag.  The horror wasn’t really all that scary, though there were sections that were definitely peculiar or uncanny.  The love story was meh.  Some say, at its heart, House of Leaves was a love story.  But narrative mostly portrayed the strained relationship between Will and Karen, the typical famous artist/intrepid adventurer who cannot stay within the confines of domesticity for stretches of time. I really thought Navidson was going to fulfill his death-wish and be lost inside the house forever, but Karen finds Navidson in the end, his body weak and broken.  It made me think of Rochester in Jane Eyre.  The only way Karen & Navidson could be together was if Navidson was so crippled, he could not on any more adventures.

 

The mystery was the most gripping part for me, at least in the beginning, as I was wondered what the fuck was up with that house?  But I quickly realized the mystery of the house was the mystery of human nature externalized as a familiar structure.  And how the author was toying with his reader right from the start.

About a quarter into the book (not counting the appendices and index which also takes up a quarter of the book’s thickness), Navidson mentioned someone in his past named Delial.  The reader soon learns that Navidson became famous for a photo he took called “The Vulture and the Little Girl”.
Serendipitously, a couple of days before, I had learned about this very photo in my FB feed, a “real” photo taken by real-life photojournalist, Kevin Carter.  I even googled him so his story was fresh on my mind.
 
So right away I knew Navidson was based on Kevin Carter who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his a photo of a skeletal child stopping to rest while a vulture watched nearby, taken while he was documenting the 1993 famine in Sudan.  Even though the photo was known as “TheVulture and the Little Girl”, the child was later revealed to be a boy. In House of Leaves, the child was always a girl.
 
Four months after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, Carter died by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1994 at age 33.  Apparently, Carter received a lot of criticism about that award-winning photograph, but it seemed like PTSD, poverty and despair were also contributing factors to his suicide. His suicide note read:

I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist. …depressed … without phone … money for rent … money for child support … money for debts … money!!! … I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners … I have gone to join Ken (a deceased colleague) if I am that lucky.

Although the text reveals that Navidson was based on a real-life person (another “proof” that Zampano had fabricated "The Navidson Record"), I found the Kevin Carter reference to be rather heavy-handed and almost in poor taste, as it exploited someone’s real-life tragedy.  There was a letter that Navidson wrote to Karen in Chapter XVII that made reference to Delial and tried to capture the deep pain he must have felt being complacent in the face of human suffering.  It echoed Carter's suicide note, felt phony and was the only big misstep (though I was only half-way through) in my immersion into House of Leaves.

 

Apparently, it took Danielewski a good ten years to write House of Leaves, and it shows in the denseness and complexity of the text.  But with such an ambitious scope, it was also uneven and unwieldy in parts.  

 

When I was close to finishing H of L, I was also looking at the colour printed end paper of the book and read the note apparently written by Zampano:

Appendix C:

Perhaps I will alter the whole thing. Kill both children. Murder is a better word. Chad is scrambling to escape, almost making it to the front door where Karen waits, until a barrier in the foyer suddenly leaps forward and hews the boy in half. At the same time Navidson, by the kitchen reaches for Daisy only to arrive a fraction of a second too late, his fingers finding air, his eyes scratching after Daisy as she falls to her death. Let both parents experience. Let their narcissism find a new object to wither by. Douse them in infanticide. Drown them in blood.

Apparently, this is another clue that "The Navidson Record" was fabricated by Zampano/Danielewski.

Another head-slapping moment for me was on p.465 when Navidson was on his last Exploration #5.  His batteries and flares were dwindling and he had only one book with him to pass the time.  Guess which book it was. Fucking House of Leaves!  OMG.  When Navidson had no more light source, he started lighting matches so he could keep reading.  Before his last match burned out, he lit the pages from the book he had just finished reading...  You can’t get any more meta than this.  It's beyond meta - it’s the snake eating itself.  And it confirmed for me that House of Leaves was not only an elaborate exercise in meta-ness, but also an elaborate gimmick.

 

Overall, HoL was still a wonderfully layered and immersive book. It was clever, even brilliant in its playfulness and experimentation.  Without a doubt, it pushed the boundaries of print, text, structure, time, space, and fictional meta-ness.  The book itself was about the nature of our perceptions.  What was also brilliant was that House of Leaves itself, like "The Navidson Record", had generated its own amount of “multidisciplinary academic literature, as well as extensive media coverage in popular culture.”

 

There’s a reddit forum for House of Leaves fans.  One person has even compiled a list of all work, real and fake, referenced in House of Leaves.

 

My only disappointment was at some of the content, which was not as original as its format and execution.  Using Kevin Carter’s story and his photograph kind of cheapened the experience for me.  Johnny Truant reminded me too much of Nicholas in The Cipher. Kathe Koja's novel was published in 1991, so it's very possible that Danielewski would’ve been inspired by it when he was working on House of Leaves.

 

I even asked Google: Did The Cipher influence House of Leaves?

AI Overview:  The Cipher by Kathe Koja and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski share thematic similarities, particularly in their exploration of "malicious non-space". Both novels feature uncanny spaces that are not easily explained by traditional horror tropes of violation or wrongdoing. House of Leaves incorporates ciphers and codes, both within the text and in in the physical layout, mirroring the coded messages in Koja's The Cipher. 

 

Although I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I was without a doubt glad I got to experience House of Leaves.  It only took me two months and one week to finish it. 

 

2. The Cipher

By Kathe Koja

 

Like Elizabeth Engstrom, I first heard of Kathe Koja in Monster, She Wrote where she was featured in the chapter “Kafka of the Weird".   Koja was also mentioned in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell.

 

The Cipher (1991) was Koja’s debut novel and it garnered some praise and awards.  Despite having a cult following, the original Abyss Line (Dell) edition went out of print.  There was an ebook version in 2012, but The Cipher did not get another reprint until 2020 with the Meerkat Press edition, which is what I have pictured.  The Cipher was part of the same book order as Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us, so it made sense that I had to read them back-to-back.

 

 

Behold the Funhole.

 

“Shit,” Nakota said, as she always did, her prayer of wonder. She knelt, bending low and supporting herself on straight-stiff arms, closer than I ever did, staring at it. Into it. It was as if she could kneel there all day, painful position but you knew she didn’t feel it, looking and looking. I took my spot, a little behind her, to the left, my own prayer silence: what to say before the unspeakable?

 

Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some—process. Rabbithole, some strange motherfucking wonderland, you bet. Get somebody named Alice, tie a string to her . . . We’d discussed it all, would discuss it again, probably tonight, and Nakota would sit as she always did, straight-backed as a priestess, me getting ripped and ripping into poetry, writing shit that was worse than unreadable in the morning, when I would wake—more properly afternoon, and she long gone, off to her job, unsmiling barmaid at Club 22 and me late again for the video store. She might not come again for days, or a day, one day maybe never. I knew: friends, yeah, but it was the Funhole she wanted. You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight.

 

Beside me, her whisper: “Look at it.”

 

I sometimes thought it had a smell, that negative place; we’d made the expected nervous fart jokes, the name itself—well, you can guess. But there was some kind of smell, not bad, not even remotely identifiable, but there, oh my yes. I would know that smell forever, know it in the dark (ho-ho) from a city block away. I couldn’t forget something that weird.

 

For the millionth time: “Wouldn’t it be wild to go down there?”

 

And me, on cue and by rote, “Yeah. But we’re not.”

 

I wish I had read The Cipher during my teens or early twenties.  I would’ve loved it, much more than I do now.  It’s nihilistic, angsty, darkly funny and very 90’s in its sordid edginess.  In the Meerkat Press edition, author Maryse Meijer penned a personal and insightful afterword about discovering The Cipher when she was thirteen.

I realized that what I had been looking for all along wasn’t a chainsaw wielding maniac or a tortured vampire or a severely haunted house, but something more existentially threatening: what I needed was a Funhole.

 

The Funhole is not a villain, not a creature, not even a thing, per se, but it is terrifying: perfectly round, absolutely dark, and infinitely deep, anything that goes inside it—or merely near it—is changed: insects grow extra heads, dead flesh comes alive, steel melts and dances and burns.  It’s capable of offering pain and a breed of pleasure beyond the limits of reason; but to receive its gifts one must surrender to the unknown. A journey that doesn’t just offer transformation, but demands it. We know, more or less, what the Funhole does, but not why it does it: the Funhole does not ascribe meaning to itself. That is a job left to Nakota and the Dingbats ad Malcolm and the rest, who scramble to make grand interpretations, all of which are, to varying degrees, bullshit… But nobody in the novel gets what they want, not even the Funhole, as Nicholas is only fleetingly, never lastingly, a willing lover; he remains merely the beloved, as Nakota is beloved by him, as the Funhole is beloved by Nakota. Love, in The Cipher, is never requited; and this is one of the novels’ many horrors, a portrait of desires that are almost always selfish and frustrated, bottomless pits into which each individual pours her darkest wishes for transcendence.

The Cipher reminded me of a more existentially mundane, early Clive Barker.  In spirit, it’s more akin to Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a comic exploring the teenage psyche in 1970's suburban America in an existentially supernatural manner. There's no physical black hole, but rather the Black Hole represents the societal fears of the times, ie. STDs and AIDs.  A mysterious plague disfigures and transforms adolescents into monstrous horrors, the perfect narrative device of externalizing the internal angst of the teenager.

 

Having watched Anora a couple of months ago, I couldn’t help but envision Mikey Madison as ruthless and volatile Nakota. 

Nakota, who saw it first: long spider legs drawn up beneath her ugly skirt, wise mouth pursed into nothing like a smile. Sitting in my dreary third-floor flat, on a dreary thrift-shop chair, the window light behind her dull and gray as dirty fur and she alive, giving off her dark continuous sparks. Around us the remains of this day’s argument, squashed beer cans, stolen bar ashtray sloped full. “You know it,” she said, “the black-hole thing, right? In space? Big dark butthole,” and she laughed, showing those tiny teeth, fox teeth, not white and not ivory yellow either like most people’s, almost bluish as if with some undreamed-of decay beneath them. Nakota would rot differently from other people; she would be the first to admit it.

 

The Cipher was beautifully written as it skillfully balanced the existential horror of an inexplicable black hole in the basement of a seedy residential building and the darkly comic cast of disaffected, deadbeat characters who exploit the Funhole for their own benefit.  My main complaint was that the writing got somewhat bogged down and repetitive as it drew out Nicholas’ achingly slow transformation via his disjointed and indulgent internal thought processes.  Nicholas’ emptiness and abject self-deprecation counterpointed with Nakota’s sociopathy and bitchiness got rather tiresome as I neared the end.  The ending was a bit disappointing too.  The Cipher had a great premise that didn’t quite deliver yet I was nevertheless immersed in the dark decaying urban microcosm Koja had conjured up.  The story was unusual, uncanny and uncomfortable.  There wasn’t much in the way of gore or violence, but there was a fair amount of gross-out body horror and depravity.  It definitely was not an easy read as observed by this reddit thread.

But still, I’m glad I read it.