Many Thanks to the bloggers that participated and allowed me to add their links/reviews to this page 🙂
Have you reviewed any horror books this year on your blog?
Put your link in the comments and I’ll post a pic and link on this page. (sci-fi books too!)
The King in Yellow is a collection of separate stories that all have a unifying thread, which includes several separate items; the script to a play called The King in Yellow, something called, the yellow sign, and the malevolent entity, the King in Yellow, himself. The King never makes an appearance in any of the stories, he is just hinted at as the demise of those seeing the yellow sign. When people read the King in Yellow manuscript, especially the second half, they either go utterly mad or strange things happen in their lives‘. The first four tales are in the subgenre known as weird tales and the rest of the book borders more on drama and romance. In fact the last few stories drop the King in Yellow tie-in and don’t feel the same as the earlier part of the book. Some versions of the book drop some of the later stories and replace it with the story by Ambrose Bierce that influenced, The King in Yellow stories, referencing places and titles, Carcosa, Hastur, and. Cassilda. Indeed Lovecraft took the King’s references even further and wrote about 
Carcosa and August Derleth turned Hastur into one of the Great Old Ones. The play, The King in Yellow, is never actually read in its entirety in any of the stories. Only sections and lines are read and delivered by the characters in the tales, keeping an air of mystery regarding the manuscript. The stories are written in turn of the century (1800s to 1900s) style which may be difficult for some today but I tend to enjoy the flamboyant use of words of that era’s authors.
I was not fully engaged with every story as some of the later tales in the book seemed to drag on without purpose to me. My favorite story however is the second tale, The Mask. Alec arrives at the Parisian home of his good friend Boris to see his friend’s break-through in the field of alchemy. He has found a way to chemically transform anything into stone, pure white marble to be precise. While Boris showcased his magic elixir, proving it could even change living things to stone, Alec grew weary and settled into the library. There he begins to read The King in Yellow. Alex soon discovers there’s only one thing more interesting than the alchemic discovery, and the manuscript, Boris’s fiancé Genevieve. He is enamored with her beauty and elegance. He had once courted her but she had turned to Boris as her life’s mate. It turns out she is also delighted with Alex on this visit, more so than in the past, and confesses her interest in him. Taken aback Alec decides he must leave his friend’s home so as not to betray his friend’s honor. He is called to the home some time later when his friend Boris dies, to help catalogue many of the artifacts in the home. To his supreme horror, there is a full-sized marble statue in the garden of Genevieve. Only Alec knows the truth of its origin. The description of the marble statue let’s you know in no uncertain terms that it is indeed Genevieve and not an artist’s sculpt.
The Repairer of Reputations is a story of extreme paranoia hinged upon the reading of the mysterious King in Yellow manuscript. In The Court of the Dragon and The Yellow Sign, both deal with being followed and haunted by a silent malevolent being. Both are creepy tales. In ‘Court…’ a church organist seems to show up in the main characters path no matter where he goes. In ‘The Yellow Sign’ this dark figure haunts a man’s every waking hours and dreams. From what I understand this collection is not the definitive collection, that depending upon the publisher there may be different tales in each publication. The Prophets Paradise and Rue Barrie are stories more in line with the KIY tales and would have been better inclusions for the collection rather than some of the more romance styled stories in the later part of the book. I imagine the current publisher chose this current set of stories to give an overview of Chambers writing through his years of authorship. So, while this collection is a good starting point for the King in Yellow series of tales, there is more to be read and discovered in the theme.
Horror Art – Magnificent Book Covers
Michael Whelan “Lovecraft’s Nightmare Part 1 and 2” paintings became numerous covers to Lovecraft collections.
Aeron Alfrey creates unique imagery inspired by the macabre, grotesque and monstrous, infecting the covers of many Thomas Ligotti books.
Rowena has her artwork gracing the covers of many books from sci-fi, to swords and sorcery, to horror. Here are a few examples.
The 1980’s Stephen King covers had simple but effective design. I got used to seeing the silver and red, author and title.
And following those are some of my Clive Barker faves.
Frank Frazetta – I was quite disappointed when I learned the Frank Frazetta Museum in PA had closed. I always wanted to visit one day. Below, the first three are some samples of Frazetta book covers.
Boris Vallejo – It is easy for me to say that it was the Boris cover art (along with Frazetta) that first got me to read books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard.
And here are the last of assorted book covers that catch my eye:
Songs of a Dead Dreamer – Thomas Ligotti (1986)
This is Ligotti’s first collection of stories, a book that is now out-of-print and editions sell for prices ranging from $26 to $260 on Amazon and Ebay. This was the very first book I downloaded onto my Kindle-Fire and may have been part of the reason I even wanted an e-reader in the first place.
This collection encompasses the strange worlds and people in the Ligotti universe. They all start off as rather bland subjects – an artist with no imagination in one, a Christmas Eve at Aunt Elsie’s in another – but take a wicked turn during the course of the tale. The artist stumbles upon a church to an unknown God in a dream, waking to find his latest painting has changed. The young man, tired of Aunt Elsie’s fireside story, leaves the house and is drawn through the fog by twinkling Christmas lights to a house that should be abandoned. They are all weird tales and subtle horror, so do not expect blood and guts violence or dominating monsters to rise from the ashes of nuclear fallout. And this collection from his earliest writings is not super strong on character development. However, the overall absurdness and abstract reality of his writing shines through in many places.
In Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech, the doctor searches a seedy part of town to engage the service of one Mr. Veech. He is told to bring his wife and best friend down a certain block at a certain time. Once there, the cheating spouse and her lover are suddenly plucked from the street by some unknown force. Dr. Voke looks up to see them dangling by strings, somehow turning into wooden puppets before his eyes.
In Sect of the Idiot, a man rents a room in an old town. The town is claustrophobically clustered, with stacked roof peaks overhanging one another, upper stories of shops and homes reaching to unknown heights and blocking out the sky. A knock at the door by a stranger leads the man to a high room in the highest towering structure in the town, where some sort of entomo-aliens sit in commune and oversee the town’s activities. They have a special reason for summoning the man, a fact he will soon learn.
The abandoned mental hospital in Dr. Locrian’s Asylum holds some bad memories of wicked events that took place there. The asylum casts a constant shadow upon the town and a blemish on its good standing. However, when the townsfolk decide to tear it down, they unleash all the trapped souls that have so long been waiting for this day, to exact revenge upon the town that ignored their cries.
Songs… also includes two essays on writing. In Notes on Writing Horror, Ligotti describes different writing styles, then takes one short story and rewrites it in several ways to exemplify those styles. In Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horrors, Ligotti attempts to explain man’s want and need for horror from a historical perspective.
While not all the stories share the same persistent voice as his later works – most were written for the small press with common small press themes – in many you can see that Ligotti’s unique style had already solidified. His strange worlds of puppets and clowns, hypnotists, conspiring entities and strange troupes with hidden agendas, rush forward from the darkest places of man’s psyche.
Recommended for fans of Lovecraft, Machen, Blackwood, Poe.
“Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.” Thomas Ligotti
parlor of horror 