The King in Yellow

"The King in Yellow forms part of a tradition of ‘weird fiction’. H P Lovecraft is the great embodiment of this largely American tradition, which gives us a sense of our world as a veneer, under which lie dark and monstrous forces. The King in Yellow is interesting because it mixes a whole range of genres. It is to begin with a work of sociological future fiction, like those of H G Wells , Edward Bellamy and William Morris. It imagines America in the near future, taken over by some kind of militaristic autocracy that encourages euthanasia. At the same time, it is a supernatural tale about a demonic book— The King in Yellow itself—the reading of which inevitably brings about madness and death. Equally, the whole thing could possibly be some kind of mad house fantasy. It is the very instability of the text that is so interesting. Where do we stand as readers? Is the narrator mad? We simply have no grounds for knowing."