"In Carcosa..."/ Dream Journal
Being on a Lovecraft kick again, I decided to acquire and read one of the books that inspired Lovecraft's creation of the Cthulu Mythos: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. Chambers was a bohemian artist of the 1890s who one day, for reasons he never really explained, decided to stop being an artist and start writing sensational romance stories. Shortly before he did that, however, he produced The King In Yellow, a collection of loosely connected, troubling stories of the surreal. The title refers to a fictional play script of the same name that is apparently cursed, bringing madness and death into the lives of all who read it. There are allusions to an entity known only as "Hastur," a blank white mask, and an insidious image known as The Yellow Sign. These things are all the scarier for the way they are only hinted at. These stories are some seriously creepy shit. And this book is messing with my mind.
I only read a few pages of the opening short story the night I got the book. That night I dreamed of Hastur. His white mask didn't have a face. Instead it had the Yellow Sign carved into it where the face should be. It was distressing. But hey, you read horror stories, you have dreams about the monsters, right? No big deal. Later that next day a friend on Facebook posted lyrics to a song by The Dead Milkmen. Not having heard or thought of that band in years, I innocently went and looked them up to see what became of them. It turns out they recently got back together and released a new album... called The King In Yellow!
What are the odds?
So today I went back and finished reading the story. (It's called The Repairer of Reputations, in case you're interested.) Reading it I was struck by a brutal sense of deja vu when I got to a specific line:
...I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead, but I thought of Hastur and my own rightful ambition, and I remembered Mr. Wilde as I had last left him...
I realized I had had a dream in which I sat reading this line over and over again several years ago. But I never actually saw it until today.
WTF is going on?
Oh. That...
I only read a few pages of the opening short story the night I got the book. That night I dreamed of Hastur. His white mask didn't have a face. Instead it had the Yellow Sign carved into it where the face should be. It was distressing. But hey, you read horror stories, you have dreams about the monsters, right? No big deal. Later that next day a friend on Facebook posted lyrics to a song by The Dead Milkmen. Not having heard or thought of that band in years, I innocently went and looked them up to see what became of them. It turns out they recently got back together and released a new album... called The King In Yellow!
What are the odds?
So today I went back and finished reading the story. (It's called The Repairer of Reputations, in case you're interested.) Reading it I was struck by a brutal sense of deja vu when I got to a specific line:
...I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead, but I thought of Hastur and my own rightful ambition, and I remembered Mr. Wilde as I had last left him...
I realized I had had a dream in which I sat reading this line over and over again several years ago. But I never actually saw it until today.
WTF is going on?
Oh. That...