Hailey Piper's imagination is immersed in the swirling, inky elixir of cosmic horror. The Bram Stoker Award-winning author has spent nearly a decade publishing all manner of frightening short fiction, novellas, and novels, and more often than not, they bend toward the towering, cataclysmic dread of the cosmic, the secret fabric of the universe that drives humans mad if we dare pierce its shimmering black veil. It's so ever-present in her mind that, according to Piper, she often doesn't see its influence on her work until readers point it out.
Then came A Game In Yellow.
Sexy, intimate, and steeped in the emotional richness of its characters and the rich veins of lore into which it taps, Piper's latest novel (coming August 12 from Saga Press) reads like a culmination of all the cosmic horror she's written so far, a treat for Piper fans that's also a stirring introduction to her work for newcomers. Speaking to me from her home in Maryland, Piper agreed that “culmination” was indeed the right word, but not for the reasons I might think.
“I do agree that it feels like a culmination, but I think the reason for that is because it's on purpose this time,” she said. “Probably most of my other cosmic work, except for The Worm and His Kings, has been by accident. A Light Most Hateful, Cruel Angels Past Sundown, even my fantasy book, No Gods for Drowning, especially Queen of Teeth, none of these were meant to be cosmic or have cosmic elements in them. I just wrote the stories as I felt they should be.”
By its title alone, longtime fans of cosmic horror and weird fiction will know that A Game In Yellow is anything but accidental. With this novel, Piper not only deliberately mines the cosmic, but also taps into a legendary work that predates even H.P. Lovecraft's titanic mythos, one that has been informing horror literature for 130 years: Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow.
Published in 1895, Chambers' collection of weird stories is best remembered for its first four tales – “The Repairer of Reputations,” “The Mask,” “In the Court of the Dragon,” and “The Yellow Sign” – and their shared connection to a play called The King In Yellow, a play so mysterious and warped in its powers that it drives people who read it completely mad. Though much of Chambers' other work – he published additional weird fiction, as well as romance, war novels, and more up to and beyond his death in 1933 – is essentially forgotten by mainstream readers, The King In Yellow and its vast, often ambiguous dread is something special.
It became, alongside stories like Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, one of the great pillars of the weird, and even inspired cosmic horror's most famous translator, H.P. Lovecraft, who re-used names from Chambers' stories in his own tales, most notably The Whisperer In Darkness, first published in 1931. In 2014, its reputation got another boost when writer Nic Pizzolatto used elements of the mythos, most notably references to “The Yellow King” and a place called “Carcosa,” in the celebrated first season of HBO's True Detective, catapulting Chambers' book into the minds of yet another generation of fans.
Like so many of her fellow cosmic horror luminaries, Piper counts herself among The King In Yellow‘s legions of admirers, but she did not set out to add to its mythos, one so revered and expansive at this point that it has its own voluminous wiki. For her, A Game In Yellow began as the story of three women. Two of them, Carmen and Blanca, are engaged in an ongoing, elaborate BDSM game together, built on trust and love, with its own very realistic set of rules, signals, and safe words. Then there's Smoke, a mysterious woman who might be just what the couple needs to get out of their present romantic rut.
Piper explained that, at first, the story was just these three characters talking to each other, their dynamic dramatic but not fixed to any particular narrative. Then, musing about Chambers' work and the long shadow it casts over modern horror, she stumbled upon the idea that reading the fictional King In Yellow play, and pulling yourself away after just a few lines, would induce not outright madness, but a powerful euphoric thrill.
“And then it just hit me like lightning,” Piper said. “‘Oh my God, that's it. That's what these three need. They need the King In Yellow.' And then it was just ideas slamming into each other very quickly. I just couldn't get the notes out fast enough.”
In Piper's novel, Smoke is the one who, through some mysterious means, has procured a few pages from the enigmatic stage play known as The King In Yellow, and offers Carmen a chance to read a few sentences. The thrill is immediate, all-consuming, and seemingly the cure for the doldrums of Carmen and Blanca's sex life. But the trouble with getting a taste of something like The King In Yellow is that your mind drifts back to it, wants more, and soon Carmen is embroiled in something much, much stranger than a kink game with her girlfriend and Smoke, their new third.
Chambers' The King In Yellow, and the mysterious play of the same name contained in his stories, has been explored and expanded many times. Chambers himself borrowed names like Hastur, Hali, and Carcosa from the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, and other writers in turn have borrowed from Chambers. There are reams of prose, role-playing games, graphic novels, and more built on The King In Yellow, but Piper's book goes further. As Carmen excitedly seeks out more and more pages of the play, Piper transcribes what her protagonist is reading, expanding Chambers' horror-within-a-horror to new levels of weird terror. It's a gutsy move, but for Piper, it's all about character building, not adding to the scaffolding of Chambers' legacy.
“I do think there's some level of hubris to that,” Piper said while discussing her own sections of The King In Yellow play. “I will say that when I started off writing this, I was just writing this for fun. I did not imagine it was going to be picked up by Simon & Schuster. So I don't know if I'd known that in advance, would I have had that hubris? Would I have done that gutsy thing? I don't know.
“There were two things to that. One is that Act One of the play, as we know it from the Chambers stuff, is not the dangerous part on its own. It's supposed to be a pretty normal play up until the end of Act One. So I felt free to explore that and just have the characters interacting, going over a little of the lore. The other side of it though, is that because this is a play that is said to offer you irresistible truths, it is supposed to be enticing and dangerous because of that. I didn't feel a pressure to be like, ‘This is the canonical version of things.'”
She added, “We're reading Carmen reading The King In Yellow. We are not ourselves reading The King In Yellow. Because if it were us, then we'd be screwed.”
The horror fiction of the 19th century, from Chambers to Bierce to Machen to Henry James, is littered with nested narratives, stories filtered out to the reader through secondhand or thirdhand accounts, things people have read, things people have heard, things people glimpsed one time only to become forever haunted.
Even Dracula, published just two years after The King In Yellow, obscures its horrors just slightly with diary entries and letters, as if to shield the reader from the horrible truth, adding layers of ambiguity to what otherwise might be a straightforward carnival show of monsters. For Piper, that sense of ambiguity, of teasing what Carcosa and Hastur and The King in Yellow are without fully revealing them, is a key piece of Chambers' legacy, and one she sought to preserve even as she expanded the mythos to suit her story.
“I think the important part was to give enough information to feel like you might have a grasp of things while also not giving all of the information,” she said. “I gave some identity to the cities within the play, Alar, Hastur, Carcosa, while also not really explaining what happened to them or how this all functions. I think those halfway things make you feel a little more confident. In Carmen's case, I think that only feeds the curiosity, so I think it was just a balancing of that. Also, I didn't want to explain everything. I have my own interpretations of Carcosa, but that doesn't mean that everyone should be privy to them. I think that's part of the magic of it, it is unknowable.”
That sense of the unknowable, the unspeakable, the unfathomable, is the engine that drives virtually all of cosmic horror, and A Game In Yellow proudly takes its place in that tradition. But what makes the novel truly frightening and masterful, even setting aside the intense and immersive character work in Piper's prose, is the sense that its inherent unknowability will entice the reader to dig deeper into their own versions of Carcosa, of the King In Yellow, of the dark depths of an entire mythos stretching back more than a century. Like the vast unknowable cosmos, it spreads, it grows, and that's what Piper hoped to capture more than any other element of Chambers' work.
“In A Game In Yellow, the play can replicate,” Piper explained. “It can regrow pages that are lost. In real life, the ideas of it replicate between us. It is this unstoppable thing. Even in real life, in our real life, it's this unstoppable thing.”
A Game In Yellow is in stores August 12 from Saga Press. Pre-orders are now open.
