The first few stories here were interesting, but especially the last two turned into a massive slog for me, and I gave up on them midway - a rare thing for me, but I think I was missing some point, reference or skill to appreciate seemingly aimless stories about art students in Paris.

Has some very entertaining and haunting stories to tell, but it definitely looses momentum as you progress through the book.

The first four stories were flowing pieces of cosmic horror adrift in a futuristic 1920s. If not for the latter half of the book becoming more of a drama, I would have given this five stars.

I might write a short review for each of the stories I enjoyed the most. But time exists, unfortunately.

to-read

The first four stories were some of the best surreal horror I've ever read. The linking of The Yellow King play to each of the stories is done really well and they were such a fun - this weird world where the tendrils of the play pierce most parts of life, just fantastic.

Then the 'and other horror stories' felt out of place (even though there were more of them than Yellow king stories). Some of them were spooky but they were tame in comparison to the first four.

It was interesting to see how they related all these short stories together. But, I didn't like enough of them to say I enjoyed the whole book.

If you’re a fan of SCP’s or horror, you’ll enjoy several stories within this book, the same stories that inspired Lovecraft and are referenced in his works. Not all the stories in the book are about The King in Yellow (in universe book/play people read and are driven to madness), but 4 are:
•The Repairer of Reputations
•The Mask
•In the Court of the Dragon
And
•The Yellow Sign

Out if those four, The Mask was my favorite. The imagery of this liquid that turns anything submerged in to it into marble (and if living, has glowing azure veins just so good) feels as though it was pulled out of fantasy. And Alec realizing the mask he had been wearing to deceive others how he was feeling about something for so long, that he deceived himself and became his own mask.

These stories have some powerful stuff. Like the King In Yellow (the fictional play) is treated as like a disease that just won’t go away. You can ignore it, and yet it will still worm its way in…

Side note: fair warning/reminder when reading this book: It was 1st published in 1895, so there are some terms and words that pop up because of it being normal at the time. I struggled more with reading Lovecraft than this book. Also, there is animal death (a horse and a cat in RR for example); murder; mentions of suicide (as well as talk about installing Lethal Chambers, legal places where people can go to die is a whole plot point in RR), people going mad, and asylums.

Not just for True Detective fanatics...

i read a different edition to this (i can't find it) which only contained the first four stories from the original king in yellow collection, the ones actually pertaining to the king in yellow, so i'm not rating this. they were good but somewhat underwhelming to my expectations - the main thing i found interesting was that the repairer of reputations is distinctly science fiction (or rather written in that mode) and that the romance elements of two of them are much stronger than i would expect coming to them without any knowledge of chambers' prior work! skimming the rest of the collection & now knowing it's mostly romances that makes a lot of sense.