The Repairer Of Reputations

“Imagine yourself a reader in the year 1895. A book called The King in Yellow, by a relatively unknown writer named Robert W. Chambers has just appeared. (A year earlier he had published a series of sketches about bohemian life in Paris, In the Quarter.) You become engulfed in a bizarre tale of the future: the year is 1920, and American civilization has been transformed. Chicago has risen “white and imperial” following the World’s Fair of 1893. More disturbingly, in the Greenwich Village section of lower Manhattan a “Lethal Chamber” has been erected for those who wish to slough off the burden of life for whatever reason. Eventually you learn that the story is being narrated by Hildred Castaigne, who has just been released from an insane asylum run by Dr. John Archer. Through the reading of a play called The King in Yellow (by an author who is never identified, but who killed himself shortly after his book appeared), Castaigne believes that he himself is the King in Yellow, and that he must kill his cousin, Louis, who he believes is vying for the crown. Along the way, Hildred meets an armorer named Hawberk; above Hawberk’s store lives a strange man named Mr. Wilde, who is grotesque in appearance and has a love-hate relationship with a vicious cat. In the end, Hildred fails in his mission to kill his cousin and is consigned in the Asylum for Criminal Insane, where he presently dies.
You, the reader of 1895, have just read “The Repairer of Reputations.”
However familiar this story may be to present-day readers, given the surprising celebrity of The King in Yellow, it is difficult to overstress how incredibly odd this tale is. It is even odder that Robert W. Chambers, having written it, later abandoned weird fiction altogether for sentimental romance and historical novels.”