A Special Edition of Dark Narratives
A bonus surprise!
Hey all! Happy First Day of the Spooky Season! I hope that you’re all primed and ready for 31 Days of Halloween…because remember, it’s a feeling, not a day :)
You may have been worried that I ghosted you all in September. I wanted to explain a bit what happened, fill you in on some exciting things going on in my writing life, and give you a little bonus content as a thank-you for sticking with me.
So where the heck have I been? The short version is that I sustained a mild repetitive stress injury that required me to dramatically cut down on my typing time for a couple weeks, which threw my production schedule out the window.
Also, September was just really, really busy. Here’s a recap of all the excitement:
I attended my first book signing!
I had a great time talking with fellow local authors, including Eirik Gumeny, and meeting-and-mingling with what I hope will become new fans. I gave out a lot of business cards and signed a couple of books and discovered in myself a surprising deep well of excitement for live events. I wrote about some of my take-aways from the experience over on Tumblr.
I sold another novel!
Ghost Orchid Press will be releasing my book Neverest in April. This book is near-and-dear to me and I think Ghost Orchid is the perfect home for it. It’s the story of a woman who climbs Mount Everest in search of her husband’s missing body, but instead of finding the closure she seeks, she walks into the grasp of supernatural forces that don’t want her to leave.
If you’re a fan of Sarah Lotz’s The White Road or Ronald Malfi’s The Ascent, you’ll be into this. Keep an eye out on the Ghost Orchid website for updates!
I’m Going to New York Comic Con!
This one’s huge! On Thursday, October 6, I’m joining some fellow Wattpad WEBTOON Studios peeps to deliver a panel about building an online following and how it feels to get work adapted from one medium to another. Check the details here!
PHEW that was a lot. I’m currently deep in the trenches of planning for NYCC, and anticipating next week to be a big chaotic in the lead-up. But once that’s all settled, I’m looking forward to things going back to normal around here for a little while :)
To tide y’all over until then, here is a bonus deep-dive I researched and wrote on commission for a friend. This post previously appeared on my Tumblr, but I hope those of you who haven’t seen it yet enjoy!
Robert W. Chambers was a prolific author of the 19th century, with dozens of novels and short story collections to his name. But if you’ve heard of him at all, it’s almost certainly because of his 1895 collection, The King in Yellow – a cluster of stories whose influence has far surpassed the fame of its creator.
What is The King in Yellow? How did it gain such infamy? And where can its ideas be found lurking, more than a century later?
There are ten stories in Chambers’ collection, spanning genres from Gothic horror to Romance, all mostly centered on artists of various kinds. The first four of these stories (and certainly the best known) carry references to “The King in Yellow” – a play that is universally censored. Even though it isn’t performed anywhere, just about everyone involved in the art scene in the book has heard of it, and many have read it, suffering deleterious effects as a result. Because, you see, the censorship of this play has less to do with its contents…and more with what it might do to those who read it.
The specific contents of the play are left mostly mysterious, with only a few small snippets to hint at its contents. Far more explicit (and intriguing) is what happens to the people who come into contact with the text.
In the first story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” the narrator is recovering from a brain injury after falling from a horse. While getting treatment, he reads “The King in Yellow” and becomes obsessed, falling into a delusion with the certainty of a conspiracy that would place him in line to a throne of succession – if he just could get his cousin out of the way first. The story relies heavily on the unreliability of its narrator, and it’s easy enough to assume that his brain damage (and not the play) is responsible for his break with reality…or is it?
The other stories tease at The King in Yellow similarly, from different angles. In one, a group of friends are driven variously to madness and suicide under the creative influence of the play. In another, a man in church thinks about the play and falls into a waking nightmare (or is it reality?) In one, a couple discover the play on their bookshelf after bringing home a related work of art, only to be filled with dread about what might happen next.
The rest of the collection does not directly reference the forbidden play, but it does share some similar vibes – from the unsettling surrealism of the events to the artist characters to the vague hints that there is a great deal more happening in the world beyond the confines of the story.
It’s hard to say for certain what Chambers had in mind when he sat down to work on these stories. They certainly seem to draw on the work of earlier writers of Gothic horror and fabulism, like Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Charles Baudelaire. He may have also been inspired by “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which had come out just a few years earlier and crafted the link between yellow and a specific kind of madness. Given the (then) futuristic and dystopian elements of “The Repairer of Reputations,” and the over-arching themes of artists, censorship, and messy interpersonal relationships, it’s reasonable to conclude that Chambers was making a larger statement on art and culture.
Regardless of his own influences, the influence Chambers had on the future of cosmic horror is inarguable. H.P. Lovecraft was so inspired by Chambers that he included references to the work in his Cthulhu Mythos story “The Whisperer in Darkness” in 1931. Later, August Derleth would make the ties between the King in Yellow and the Lovecraft mythos more explicit, forever linking them together – and creating a more monstrous, physical manifestation for the King himself.
All of that is interesting in its own right. But I’m more interested in the underlying conceit of the story itself – the idea of a work of fiction that could destroy the mind of someone who came in contact with it.
Forbidden Knowledge
The theme of forbidden knowledge (and the consequences of learning it anyway) is a common one in folklore, from Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden, to Prometheus’s stolen fire, to Bluebeard’s too-curious wife. But in these ancient tales, the focus is a bit different: A person in authority warns you against doing something, you do it anyway, and they punish you for the transgression. Sure, you may sometimes find more than you bargained for (such as the myth of Pandora’s box), but the punishment is being handed out by the authority you disagreed with.
Not so for The King in Yellow.
Considering the effect it seems to have on those who come in contact with it, its universal censorship seems to be a helpful thing. After all, if something could cause that much harm just by proximity, then banning it outright would be a good thing, right?
Unless, of course, its notoriety is what draws people to seek it out in the first place.
Unless it’s the rarity of the object, and the difficulty of the quest, that attracts people already prone to a certain kind of madness – or those people project their delusions onto the thing.
There is a principle called an “information hazard” or “info hazard,” which refers to knowledge that, if it were allowed to spread, would lead to harm – because it would put power into the hands of people who could not yield it responsibly. For example, the exact formulation of particular poisons or bomb-making materials could constitute an information hazard because they might fall into the hands of kids or bad actors. (the logistics of whether or not controlling that information actually works is a subject for another essay)
But what about knowledge that is itself inherently harmful – not because it will be used for nefarious purposes, but because it hurts the person who learned it? Haven’t we all had the experience of learning something we wished we didn’t know, and from which there’s no return? It’s the horror of overhearing a friend saying something cruel about you when you shouldn’t have been listening, writ large to a cosmic scale.
The universe is vast and unknowable, and you are a small and simple ape. If you have the misfortune of catching a glimpse at the wider world, the greater truth of the universe, you may not be happy with what you find…and you may not be able to leave it alone.
A Horror History of Tales to Drive You to Madness
The concept of art inciting violence or driving a reader/viewer insane crops up in modern horror in a variety of different ways.
In John Carpenter’s 2005 short film Cigarette Burns, produced as an episode of the Masters of Horror series, a rare films dealer goes on a worldwide quest for a notoriously disturbing film titled La Fin Absolue du Monde. This film reportedly aired once and was meant to be destroyed after inciting a homicidal riot at its premiere; but it was not destroyed, instead passing through several owners and wreaking absolute havoc on the lives of everyone it’s touched. We catch discordant glimpses of the film throughout Carpenter’s movie, but the story makes it clear that the actual content of the film is not what gives it power. Rather, it’s the evil act behind the film’s production that makes it so dangerous.
The same could arguably be said for The Ring franchise of films adapted from Koji Suzuki’s Ring trilogy (beginning in 1998). The initial conceit of the story revolves around a cursed videotape that kills anyone who watches it seven days later. In many ways, Suzuki’s work straddles the border between ghost story and cosmic horror, and The Ring in particular spawned a number of pale imitations.
The story evoked in Cigarette Burns also seems to be the inspiration for the 2018 Canadian horror film Antrum, which claims to be recovered footage of a cursed film released in the 1970s. The film is bookended by documentary-style warnings and history. The film itself (which mostly tells the story of two kids who inadvertently summon the devil) is fairly underwhelming, but with that kind of build-up, it would almost have to be.
Part of Antrum’s gimmick is that there are unrelated scenes from a purported “snuff” film spliced into the footage by an unknown person. Snuff (a film where a person is killed live on camera) plays a role in Cigarette Burns as well. But we cannot talk about snuff in the context of forbidden films without David Cronenberg’s 1983 film, Videodrome.
Videodrome tells the story of a television exec who unwittingly stumbles on a satellite feed that appears to be broadcasting scenes of torture and murder. Intrigued and thrilled, he decides to investigate further and begins airing the footage as well. Unbeknownst to him, though, he’s tapped into something quite sinister – a sociopolitical weapon used to control the population. If you can make violent pornography destroy the people who watch it, society will be improved….right?
In a similar vein on a much smaller scale is 2012’s Gut, directed by Elias. A disaffected office worker gets a thrill when a friend shows him a bootleg snuff video of unknown origins. Is it real? Is it fake? By the time it worms its way into his thoughts and forms a destructive obsession in his mind, it doesn’t natter. Violence ensues.
Not all snuff films are sexual in nature. Consider the box of home movies in Sinister (also from 2012), evidence of grisly murders of multiple families. In watching, he unwittingly invites a demon into his life – the evil force responsible for those murders in the first place.
At the fringes of these stories are other types of cosmic horror tales, all centered on the horrors of forbidden knowledge that pierces the veil of our understanding of reality – from Lovecraft’s work to Darren Aronofsky’s π to Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.
So what gives? Why our persistent fascination with being destroyed by what we should not know?
Horrors of the Information Age
Cosmic horror has been enjoying a resurgence in the last 20 years, and I don’t think it’s wholly surprising.
We live now in an era when the collective knowledge of mankind is, arguably, at your fingertips at all times. We have greater and more widespread literacy than ever. With that, unfortunately, comes the spread of misinformation. Our odds of stumbling across something ghastly are also higher than ever. A generation ago, nobody was likely to accidentally find grisly crime scene photos, a live streamed murder, a videoed terrorist decapitation, or anything else. Now, you can stumble across those things, and once these traumatic images have been seen, you cannot unsee them.
Sometimes you want to spread them. You want to pass them to the person next to you, maybe for the same reason you’d hand off a carton of sour milk. “Hey, does this taste rotten to you?” You want to know if the image is real. You want someone you can talk to about the emotional experience of seeing it. You want someone to share in that trauma.
There are also pockets of forbidden knowledge in our society, a handful of places where we are not allowed to tread – certain subjects that are illegal to search for – coupled with an all-seeing, vigilant watchman who will see us and judge us for our sins. When you know that whatever you search might land you on a government watchlist somewhere, it’s plausible to become obsessed with that knowledge, or develop a compulsion toward that information, even if you don’t even want to know it in the first place. That’s a human nature thing that I think is reflected well in cosmic horror.
But what of The King in Yellow’s other proposition – that a sufficiently powerful story could drive someone to madness? Could a story really incite someone to violence the way Cigarette Burns would suggest?
Contrary to the worries of fandom antis, I’m not convinced that a work of fiction can cause an act of violence. Barring any supernatural involvement (tortured angels, for example), I don’t think any piece of media can jump over the gate of free will and force you to do anything.
But I can see why artists might like to pretend we wield that kind of power. I don’t think it’s coincidental that Chambers wrote primarily about artists, and that authors and filmmakers would be so intrigued by the idea of a piece of art so influential it could take over a person’s brain. It’s a fiction…but it’s a compelling one.
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