Who was "The King in Yellow"?

"The King in Yellow" is a book of short stories by the American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The book is named after a play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed horror stories, and the book has been described as a classic in the field of the supernal. There are ten stories, the first four of which ("The Repairer of Reputations", "The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon", and "The Yellow Sign") mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it.

H. P. Lovecraft read "The King in Yellow" in early 1927 and included passing references to various things and places from the book—such as the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign — in "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931), one of his main Cthulhu Mythos stories. Lovecraft borrowed Chambers' method of only vaguely referring to supernatural events, entities, and places. The play "The King in Yellow" effectively became another piece of occult literature in the Cthulhu Mythos alongside the Necronomicon and others.

The Cthulhu Mythos is a mythopoeia and a shared fictional universe, originating in the works of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The name "Cthulhu" derives from the central creature in Lovecraft's seminal short story, "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928.