The King in Yellow

There is a play you must never read past the first act.

The first act of The King in Yellow is harmless, even beautiful. The second act destroys everyone who finishes it. In its pages lies Carcosa, the lost city where black stars hang and twin suns sink into the lake of Hali, where the King walks in tattered yellow robes behind a pallid mask and the Yellow Sign waits on the page to be seen. To read on is to invite him in. Those who do speak afterward of Cassilda's song and the towers behind the moon, and then, soon enough, they speak of nothing at all.

Robert Chambers set the King loose in 1895, and weird fiction has never quite shaken him: a monarch made entirely of dread and bad theater.

Crowned here in his spiral sign over the spires of Carcosa. Printed heavy on garment dyed cotton, for the ones who always need to know how the story ends.