The World We Deserve

“...for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.”
― Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow

I think I'm one of seven people who actually read Robert Chambers' collection of short stories entitled The King In Yellow, published in 1895. At the time I read it, there was no such show on television called True Detective. At the time I read it, Woody Harrelson was still Woody Boyd on Cheers and Matthew McConaghaghoaghy-Whatever was some guy who popped up in pillowy chick flicks from time to time.  

I read the book because I was - Once Upon A Time - in charge of the horror section at the Borders bookstore I worked in. I'd already read everything ever written by by Lovecraft and had been aware of the fact that he'd been strongly influenced by Arthur Machen - author of The Great God Pan, another book I devoured - and the aforementioned Robert Chambers. A copy of The King In Yellow popped up one day and I picked it up...and couldn't put it down. 

I'd recently become a fan of the series Masters Of Horror, in particular the contribution by director John Carpenter entitled Cigarette Burns, starring a then-mostly-unknown actor named Norman Reedus, who was still years away from being famous White Trash Zombie Killing Biker Babe Daryl Dixon on AMC's The Walking Dead. The premise of Cigarette Burns - a story about a film so corrupted and utterly evil that it drives anyone who watches it to the limits of insanity - was eerily similar to the thread running through The King In Yellow, a two act play which is never revealed in its entirety, but which is said to drive its every reader not only insane, but forcibly into a parallel dimension where black stars fill the skies and a world is brought to ruin by the unmasking of a tattered alien king. The disciples of the King in Yellow roam undead through space and time, crossing paths with the artistic and the unstable, touching them with diseased hands and leaving the mark of Hastur upon their souls. The marked can only await their doom, insane and resigned. 

Nobody really knew what the hell was going on in Season One of True Detective. We knew the basics: child molestation, a Southern fried hatred of women, religion turned to poison, deep seated corruption and a man already touched by the King in the form of drunken Rust Cohle. The death of his daughter opened a door, and his abuse of drugs knocked it right off its hinges. Rust accepted the existence of The King in Yellow without question, and patiently awaited his fate like any other marked. His glimpse of the vortex in the caves of Carcosa was the moment the King had come to claim him. By destroying the human acolyte, Rust was thrown violently back into sanity, every bit as jarring an experience as that which originally knocked him off the rails of reason to begin with. That's my interpretation and I'm sticking to it. Art is subjective, mutherfucker. 

Thank you, http://quintendo64.tumblr.com

Season 2 has absolutely fuckall to do with Season 1. There is no King in Yellow, there are no black stars or cosmic vortexes or horrific rituals conducted in secret. Well, not yet anyway. And so far, all I've heard in the aftermath are the whines of the easily distracted who are used to being spoonfed immediate gratification.  

Look, it doesn't fucking matter if you can't follow the plot of Season 2, because I honestly don't believe 95% of anyone grasped all of the nuances of Season 1, mainly because nobody read the original 100+ year old stories it was loosely based on. It doesn't matter who is doing what to whom or why. It's enough to be aware of the fact that shit like this happens every day, in every country, in every race and every society. Most of you can't tell me why the current economic system is failing or who exactly is to blame, but you all know it's bad and you're all incensed by it. So what's the difference here? 

The story does not matter. Just watch the characters. Watch their faces, their reactions, their suspicions, assumptions and triggers. That's the fucking story, right there in their haggard, haunted faces. They're all vessels, not quite hollowed out but on their way surely, allowing the empty spaces in their souls to be slowly filled by the despair that the King brings, waiting until its their turn to enter the void. There is no hope. Life doesn't care about us. Death is unavoidable. And no matter how tough and jaded and cynical you think you are, no matter how much you've seen and think you can bear, you will always be human: fragile and flawed. You will bow before the face of horror, your knees will buckle at the sight of mortality and you will never be prepared for the long, dark plunge into the awful depths of human evil and ugliness. 

So shut up and watch the faces. Stop waiting for a flow chart. Experience the misery of being helplessly human in a hopeless world. 

“This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now trembles before the King In Yellow.”
― Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories