The King In Yellow, The Queens In Red

Cassilda’s Song is one of the last fruits of Chaosium’s fiction line to have been primarily developed under Charlie Krank’s management of the company. (If you don’t know who that is, or hadn’t heard about the change of regime at Chaosium, I go into it here.) Editor Joseph S. Pulver’s introduction is signed off in May 2015, a mere month before Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen mashed the reset button and signalled the end of Krank’s tenure, but the actual book was released in August of that year; presumably, the new management realised that with a basically-finished book on their hands, they may as well put it out so as to get a welcome injection of income as they tried to put the company in order.

Part of that “putting the company in order” process involved getting in James Lowder to clean house as far as the fiction line went. As Lowder and Chaosium implicitly acknowledged when announcing Lowder’s long-term appointment as Executive Editor of the fiction line, the previous regime had left something of a messy situation behind, with numerous contractual obligations (and monies owed) let unmet. (Much the same situation prevailed on the RPG side of Chaosium’s activities.) Now that the bulk of that is behind him, Lowder’s been able to gear up to get the fiction line moving again – but the necessity of making good on old commitments and publicly showing that Chaosium has turned the ship around on that has meant that for a good chunk of time Cassilda’s Song has served as the freshest selection in Chaosium’s horror anthology repertoire.

It’s good that there is a solid concept underlying it, then. Long-time readers will know how on multi-author anthologies I like to give them a rating on the ol’ Boy’s-Club-o-meter, to see just how disproportionate the representation of male authors is. There’s no need this time; the idea of Cassilda’s Song is that it’s a selection of stories inspired by Robert Chambers’ The King In Yellow cosmology written by women – like a more fin de siècle take on She Walks In Shadows, Innsmouth Free Press’s collection of Cthulhu Mythos stories by women which came out at around the same time (and has a significant overlap of authors).

Hauntings of All Phases

Though David Tibet will likely be primarily known forever as the mind behind Current 93, which as previously chronicled started out as part of an esoteric circle of influential industrial musicians before mutating into a poetic Gnostic weird folk project (after steering uncomfortably in the direction of fascistic neofolk before Tibet wised up, righted the ship, and changed up his collaborators), this is not the only string to his bow.

As well as a sideline as a visual artist, Tibet has also maintained a long career as a collector of vintage horror fiction and weird tales, and has also turned his hand to publishing, editing, and facilitating the reprinting of rare material from time to time; for instance, he played a key role in rediscovering and making available again the eccentric work of Count Stenbock, and it was his suggestion which led to Wordsworth releasing The Drug and Other Stories, the most substantial collection of the short stories of Aleister Crowley ever put between two covers.

Tibet has also, more recently, tried his hand at being an anthologist. The Moons At Your Door, published in 2015 via Strange Attractor and released in conjunction with the Current 93 album which shares its title, is a collection of fiction which has over his years of reading and collecting continued to resonate with him. Inevitably, a lot of this has seeped its way into Current 93’s musical output, because Tibet is the sort of creator who isn’t shy of acknowledging his influences, and so the selection is in some respects idiosyncratic and reflective of Tibet’s expansive range of interests and obsessions. But is it any good to read for anyone who isn’t David Tibet?

Hastur Be Seen To Be Believed

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In the 1990s Chaosium decided to put out a series of Cthulhu Mythos short story anthologies as an adjunct to the Call of Cthulhu RPG. To oversee the line they engaged the services of Robert M. Price, who at the time was prominent in Lovecraft fandom as the editor of Crypt of Cthulhu. The Price-edited entries in the series tended to fall into one of two categories; compilations of works by a particular prominent Mythos author (such as the Lin Carter, Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner collections I’ve covered previously), and “Cycle” books.

These latter tomes were based around the idea of choosing a particular Mythos entity or subject and collecting together the major stories that dealt with the concept in question, as well as stories which seemed to influence the original conception of the idea in question. In principle, this is actually a pretty good idea, because it would allow you to place Lovecraft’s stories in the context of the broader tradition they were a part of. The concept stumbled when Price took the approach of building these cycles around individual creatures and entities, rather than around broader themes.

The Regal Chambers

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Rarely has a writer written so much and had so little of their work celebrated as Robert W. Chambers. Despite churning out a rather mighty bibliography, to my knowledge there isn’t any serious discussion of more than a fraction of his material, and that discussion is almost all focused on a single book.

But to be fair, it’s a hell of a book. The King In Yellow was a collection of short stories, issued towards the very start of Chambers’ career. It had been preceded by In the Quarter, a novel about life among struggling artists in Paris which ended up marred by a detour into antisemitism. The King In Yellow mingled stories about American art students in Paris – presumably drawing on Chambers’ own experiences, and including cameos from characters from In the Quarter – with a much stranger set of stories, representing some of the finest supernatural horror to come out of the late 19th Century.

These stories seem to be thematically linked by a shared mythology, of the sort which H.P. Lovecraft would also utilise in his own work, built up more through allusion than through direct exposition. At the centre of this is a suppressed play, The King In Yellow, which alludes to such places, people and concepts as Hastur, Carcosa, the Hyades, Aldebaran, Cassilda, Camilla and the Lake of Hali. (Some of these names are borrowed from Ambrose Bierce). The exact relevance to all of this to the action is often obscure, but seems indicative of a supernatural, and possibly even alien or cosmic force at work behind the scenes – a technique repeated to an extent in True Detective’s use of these concepts.