Stories
The first four stories are loosely connected by three main devices:
- A play in book form entitled The King in Yellow
- A mysterious and malevolent supernatural entity known as The King in Yellow
- An eerie symbol called The Yellow Sign
These stories are macabre in tone, centering on characters that are often artists or decadents. The first and fourth stories, "The Repairer of Reputations" and "The Yellow Sign", are set in an imagined future 1920s America, whereas the second and third stories "The Mask" and "In the Court of the Dragon" are set in Paris.
The other stories in the book do not follow the macabre theme of the first four, and most are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers' later work. Some are linked to the preceding stories by their Parisian setting and artistic protagonists.
Read more about this topic: The King In Yellow
Famous quotes containing the word stories:
“A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.
Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge’s way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)