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Episode 489 - The Mask (Patreon)

Published:
2020-02-27 16:58:01
Edited:
2024-12-12 19:02:14
Imported:
2026-06
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We're having a look through The Mask from The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers!

We're once again joined by special guest - author and game designer Kenneth Hite!

You've got to get a copy of The King in Yellow -- Annotated Edition!

Special thanks to our reader Levi Nunez. Check out Loot the Body!

Comments

Strength24

Dead Bath from Beyond… 😑

H P Lovecraft's Cat

Interesting insights on this story, it is one of the better ones in the collection. Chad makes some very good points about the "Gatekeeper Zeitgeist " and it falling away in out current society. This is being attacked in media from above and below at the moment, the POTUS can easily communicate with the masses in a tweet, while anyone with particular talents can create blogs and podcasts. The "censorship " of smaller YouTube accounts, is more a of bully tactic by a dying media. Radio and newspapers are particularly interesting, imagine explaining to a child in 10 years that you would have to wait for a radio dj to play your new favorite song (along with a tape player to record it and hopefully he/she wouldn't continue talking through the beginning) or in the case of newspaper actually having it delivered in the front yard.Entire industries which use to create "truth " are losing, it creates a period of unrest and fear.As we see with the sentencing of Hollywood gatekeepers producers as well.My father had this saying (other used as well) "When the tide goes out ,you see all the shipwrecks ",we living in this glorious time (a nightmare for some I imagine).

Jason Thompson

My two cents: “Maldoror” by the Comte de Lautreamont is one of the closest things to “The King in Yellow” in reality. Published in 1868 by a writer who died shortly after at age 24. The weirdest, gloomiest, Gothiest, most super-evil book imaginable. Part prose-poetry, part novel, the story of a predatory emo supervillain who can change shape and whose goal is... TO DEFEAT GOD! Also, he has sex with a shark. The book vanished into obscurity after Lautréamont’s death but was rediscovered by the surrealists who loved it. Proto-surrealist decadent horror with a vision of God that’s almost Azathoth-ish. I don’t know if it’s driven anyone literally insane, but....

Peter Lillevold

Shoutout to @Allicorn, enjoy (again and again!) the Tatters of the King OST, to all this King in Yellow goodness 😌

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

My bestie actually has his own pet King in Yellow: Irene Iddesleigh, by Amanda McKittrick Ros. After he finished it, he spent a good half hour shuffling around his apartment, dumbfounded, going "...Wow. Just...just *wow.*" It was so utterly BAD, qualitatively and ethically, and so manipulative in how it repeatedly yanked the rug out from under him just as he was about to acclimate to the current plateau of badness, that according to him he did honestly feel like he was on the verge of a nervous break when it was finally over.

Charles Lubelczyk

This story reminds me a bit of a piece published by Mary Elizabeth Counselman in Weird Tales in 1937. In that, a sculptor encounters a creature capable of transforming organic life into statues. Chambers’ tale might be the inspiration for Counselman’s?

HRPrice

I also really like The Mask! Its happy(ish?) ending allows for a reading of the in-universe book The King in Yellow as a catalyst for painful but not necessarily ‘evil’ truths. Oh, you guys are in love and desperately unhappy and trying to maintain an illusion of normalcy for the sake of others? Well, here comes the King in Yellow to reveal your secrets, give you fevers and cause deaths and near deaths! You know, all the suffering you were trying to avoid by keeping your mouths shut! ... But, once it’s all come crashing down, there’s a possibility of happiness on the other side. One you wouldn’t have if the status quo had been maintained. There’s also the weird implication that something was guiding events toward the happy ending. That letter contained Jack’s urgent and inexplicable warning that Alec needed to be in the house at a specific time- presumably, so he would be there when Genevieve woke up. How did he know? Did Jack ever touch the King in Yellow? Was Genevieve’s leap into the death bath guided by something? I also think there’s a reading of Court of the Dragon where all that the narrator learns from the book is “Hey bud- you’re damned.” That combines with the quote at the front (blatantly paraphrased) “why would your lamentations make any difference to an omniscient God who has already made his judgment?” to make very efficient horror story. The narrator can’t find comfort in the Church, as that’s the home of his judge and executioner. He also can’t escape to the Court of the Dragon, the home of worldly pleasures and possibly past sins (if you’re willing to symbolically connect the “Dragon” with “The Devil”, which I do), because God’s wrath is all-reaching. In this reading, the King in Yellow at the end is just the Christian god seen through the lens of the source of the narrator’s revelation, rather than a distinct entity. It’s possible I favor this reading just because I think “Hey, have you ever noticed Christianity is freakin’ TERRIFYING?” is a neat base for a horror tale.

Jeff C. Carter

A few more real world examples of art said to drive people mad: “The Devil’s Interval”, a sequence of musical notes once banned by the Catholic Church. Jerusalem Syndrome – a religious mania that has been said to strike otherwise sane people upon exposure to the architecture and culture of Jerusalem. A secular version of this is ‘Stendhal Syndrome’ AKA ‘Florence Syndrome’, where visitors to Florence are overwhelmed by the majestic beauty of the art and architecture. Stephen King has compared writing to telepathy, and this could also convey a writer’s madness. L. Ron Hubbard begged the VA for psychological treatment in 1974. He later went on to win the Guinness World Record for ‘Most works published by one author’, and it has been observed by critics that those who ingest all of his writings tend to develop his same type of paranoid schizophrenia.

The Call of Cassandra

L Ron Hubbard claimed that his book Excalibur would drive those who read it insane. It was never published. Possibly never written in the first place. Though supposedly he used parts in Dianetics later on. However, I did read Battlefield Earth in my teens, and wish that someone had killed me beforehand to spare me the horror of that. Where is the King in Yellow when you need him?

Steve

Well that was all kinds of fun. I just have to say that Carnacki would be immense. I shall sit in my electric pentacle until Shane relents. And once you've done that, there'd be no reason not to do House on the Borderlands.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

My favorite bit of writing here is structural. There's a neat trick to pull off where the reader becomes aware of something really important that the protagonist has not yet worked out. We are excited because we know his love is either alive or about to be so - and we anticipate joy to come while dreading the possibility that he will do something rash like kill himself in despair. To pull this off successfully, the writer must hold that suspense long enough for us to enjoy it, but not too long or we become frustrated. Chambers nails it.

Shana Carter

Your podcast inspired me to check out some of Robert W. Chambers's other works, many of which are available for free through Kindle. There's one, "The Tracer of Lost Persons," which occupies a middle ground between "The King in Yellow" and the shopgirl romances. Most of the book reads like a dry run for the (vastly superior) comedies of P.G. Wodehouse, but some of it gets a little Weird. One character is a man haunted by the apparition of a girl he saw only once in the flesh; when he attempts to photograph the manifestation, no one else can see her in the picture. Another client hires the title character to track the tomb robbers who stole the strangely preserved body of an Egyptian dancing girl he fell in love with after finding her in an ancient buried ruin. I don't think the book is Weird enough to be covered by you guys, but there are worse ways of filling an hour or two.

Alexander Shendi

Hi, I'm new to this Patreon. Can I download the episode as an audio file? I would like to listen to it on a train without internet connection. Alternatively is there an RSS feed I can enter into my podcast app? Also, many thanks for this episode.

Richard Angliss

Unrelated to this specific episode, but having just watched the new Color Out of Space film, I was wondering if you guys plan on reviewing it for a bonus episode?

H P Lovecraft's Cat

The drip back into The King in Yellow reminds me that it would be interesting to do the “The Illuminatus! Trilogy “ both authors have past and it is maybe Sci-Fi / Weird Fiction?(Hard to actually nail down the novel).But there are tons of weird fiction and references to the authors.The Cult of the Yellow Sign is a cult that rules over everything,well maybe,along with a Cthulhu type entity.It would take a month for each of the three stories,could be done over a long time Illuminatus Walpurgis (either April or May) over 3 years.

Tyler young

Great episode guys! I think this story is certainly better than most of the others in this collection, though not near as good as the Yellow Sign or Repairer of Reputations in my opinion. I can’t remember if you guys mentioned this or not but is the character named Scott in this story the same as the Mr. Scott in The Yellow Sign? If so, it certainly adds a cool element to both stories that really enhance my reading of them both.

robert

You're improving in my opinion! Very entertaining! It's like I am on an Island surrounded by storm clouds.

Markus Lauerer

I could listen to Ken Hite talk for ages, he's such a knowledgeable, pleasant guy.

Matthew Sanborn Smith

Hearing Kenneth joke about Atlas Shrugged on a podcast about the King in Yellow reminded me of a story called "Grave Worms" by Molly Tanzer. It's a mashup of Chambers and Ayn Rand in which a Randian heroine goes to see a certain play. Instead of "Who is John Galt?" the question characters throw about without any understanding is, "Have you found the yellow sign?" It's a fun story with a great ending for those familiar with both authors. It's free to read online.

MMOT

I finished reading the King in Yellow and was really confused about the last paragraph, so now I am a happy subscriber.

Alan Ricks

I thought this was going in an even darker direction. When she jumped into the death pond and sank to the bottom as a statue I thought they were going to leave her there because she was super heavy and “dead”. Then when she turned back into a human she would of drowned as he rushed to check on her after seeing the flower.

Josh Decker

I want both, Kenneth Hite! The Carnacki stories and the Willows are some of my favorites