The King in Yellow

An avatar of Hastur. Appears as a gigantic man dressed in tattered yellow robes; he appears to wear the Pallid Mask, though whether or not he actually wears it is a subject for debate. He presides over festivities at masquerade balls held in Carcosa. The King is a fair ruler; all of his subjects can expect to be treated equally under his care. This only sounds good to people who do not actually live in or visit Carcosa.

Also, a blasphemous play written in the late 19th century by an unknown playwright. The play has never been performed, and no one is known to have even read it all the way through; the few who are known to have tried often find themselves plagued by blindness or premature death. It is also said that the play is different for every person who reads it. It is said that the story opens the mind of the reader to madness and eventually transports him or her to the lost city of Carcosa, there to dwell for all eternity.

"The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers
"The Yellow Sign" by Robert W. Chambers
"More Light" by James Blish
Encyclopedia Encyclopedia by Daniel Harms, pp. 113-114

The Last King has come.

A fictitious play in the Lovecraft Mythos; according to James Blish's short story, More Light, no one can read The King In Yellow through in one sitting. - Not because it's long, but power outages and other such interruptions always just happen to prevent it.

Fictitious Books | Necronomicon | Hastur

The King in Yellow (first published in 1895) is a collection of short stories written by author Robert W. Chambers. Most of the tales in the collection are supernatural, and the first four ­­— “The Repairer of Reputations”, “The Mask”, “In the Court of the Dragon”, and “The Yellow Sign” — all deal with the King In Yellow and his Yellow Sign. Who (or what) is the King in Yellow? In some tales, The King in Yellow is the book of a popular play spreading like a virus through the cities and destroying the sanity of all who read it:

“Have you never read it?” I asked.

“I? No, thank God! I don’t want to be driven crazy.”

I saw he regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it. There is only one word which I loathe more than I do lunatic and that word is crazy. But I controlled myself and asked him why he thought The King in Yellow dangerous.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, hastily. “I only remember the excitement it created and the denunciations from pulpit and Press. I believe the author shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn’t he?”

“I understand he is still alive,” I answered.

“That’s probably true,” he muttered; “bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that.”

“It is a book of great truths,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, “of ‘truths’ which send men frantic and blast their lives. I don’t care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme essence of art. It’s a crime to have written it, and I for one shall never open its pages.”

The concept of a madness-inducing book will seem familiar to anyone who has read much H.P. Lovecraft.  Chambers’ The King in Yellow was a clear and considerable influence on Lovecraft’s work, particularly his fictional, forbidden Necronomicon, which was first seen in his 1924 short story “The Hound” and which has been used as a horror trope in countless works by different authors and filmmakers since then. Lovecraft has been such an influential and popular author that the King in Yellow mythos is retroactively considered to be part of the Lovecraftian mythos.