Although it’s not a horrific and cult-based story as we typically see when referencing the Yellow King. The King In Yellow – Raymond ChandlerĬhandler’s short story takes chunks of Chambers’s work and spins it into the noir genre.

This is why we never see the King’s real face, it being beyond human conception, or rather, invisible. The use of the veiled burkha, or in Chambers’s story, a pallid mask, says that the human consciousness can’t process what’s beyond our scope without giving up the ego entirely. One of the famous lines from The King in Yellow is, “Why Madam, I wear no mask!” The Invisibles take this and uses the idea of the mask being the real face as the King in Yellow and his trio transform into the Harlequinade. While Chambers never provided a way of fully explaining his King, Morrison found ways to mix the King into his Invisible universe. How does The King in Yellow tie into all of this? For one, the trio leader has a direct correlation with the imagery of the Yellow King. The Invisibles | Grant Morrison | Vertigo Comics They’re revealed to be the Harlequinade, a hyper-dimensional force that works for both the Invisible College and the Outer Church. Volume three of the series introduces a trio consisting of a man in a yellow veiled burkha, a butler and maid. In a nutshell, The Invisibles is about a group of advanced (to put it lightly) occultists, fighting a war behind the scenes of what we perceive as the world. We’ve narrowed it down to the top five stories to help further understand the power of The King in Yellow. There are several stories that this book has influenced and directly referenced. The book takes its name after a play that serves as the motif within the stories. From cult gatherings to individual acts, The Yellow King has popped up more and more in the past 125 years since the original novella was published. Its presence hangs like a looming eternal curse ready to infect and corrupt minds for its bidding. The King in Yellow, a collection of short stories written by Robert W. Throughout various mediums, a mysterious figure has walked into stories through manipulation and fear.

The king in yellow stories