Okay, I'm utterly lost.

Is The King in Yellow a legendary book that nobody thought existed? What's it about? Backstory, please?

So, Matt, is this a modern backfill or does it actually predate Chambers?

I'm certain that it's a modern backfill on Ryng's part. Since buying I've turned up references by people associated with Pagan Publishing (the company that bought out the inventory of Armitage House) that refer to Ryng as the writer rather than translator. And the Translator's Introduction refers to English editions of the play published under the name The King in Yellow in 1892 and 1893—I feel certain that if those had actually existed, Chambers aficionados would have turned up reference to them long before 1999.

It did arrive under interesting circumstances though—the package from Britain was completely sealed in packing tape, and the cardboard envelope within was sopping wet. (Fortunately the seller had also used bubble wrap, so the book itself was unharmed.) I've never before gotten a delivery that was so thoroughly soaked by the elements despite attempts to seal it. The moldering grave-y smell thereby produced puts me in the mood to reread "The Yellow Sign" from Chambers before diving into the actual play.

The King in Yellow is a fictional play in the story and story collection of the same name by Robert W. Chambers. People who read it go mad; or their world goes mad around them; or both.

It sounds like standard horror stuff, but it is very effectively creepy.

Chambers was an influence on Lovecraft, if I've got the timing right, and various pastiches or references to his work show up in writers from diverse as Marion Zimmer Bradley (possibly via Lovecraft) and James Blish, who wrote a creepy metastory about the whole thing called, I think, "More Light." It's Alchemy and Academe, an anthology edited by Anne McCaffrey, which has different writers and much odder, stranger, and darker stories than you'd expect her to collect. (There's a kind of not-vampire story by Samuel R. Delany, I think, and an odd bittersweet story by Sonya Dorman, and something by Gene Wolfe, and a poem by John Updike, among other things). I read it years before hearing of Chambers, so I just thought Blish made the whole thing up.

The King in Yellow is a fictional play in the story and story collection of the same name by Robert W. Chambers.

Aha. Thank you. So it is like The Necronomicon.

It was Lovecraft's inspiration for the Necronomicon.

Actually, Blish's "More Light" was my introduction to Chambers. I'd never even heard of the play or stories up to that point, but Blish's take was interesting enough to make me go looking for it.

ETA: I've just read the first couple of pages of the play itself—the language seems suspiciously modern for something that was supposedly written by a sublime/blasphemous French playwright over a century ago. It's too early to judge for sure, but I think Blish did a better job of capturing the elegance of speech and sense of portent that the play should possess.

Note to self: watch Matt for unexplained psychotic breaks and odd chanting.

Pfft! As if I needed a cursed play to drive me to that.

Book 4 in the Thursday Next series is being released...thursday, August 5.

Dude! It's like Ringu in print form, yes?