THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 1st September 2020: DAY 156

'The Constant Library',  Volume VIII:
"The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers.'

'The Constant Library',  Volume VIII: "The King in Yellow.", Robert W. Chambers.'

"The idea for 'The Constant Library' follows on from a recent conversation considering which books had, and continue to have, the greatest affect my life in a variety of different ways. These are the books I can't live without and whenever possible I have a copy of with me wherever I travel in the world; my 'Constant Library."

There are short stories and there are short stories. Conan Doyle, Calvino, they were masters of the genre, but so was the little know Robert W. Chambers. Stylistically he was closer to Calvino that Conan Doyle, in that 'The King in Yellow' is a series of some of the most surreal tales you will ever read. The can be judged with confidence along the side of the works of Carrington, Poe, Wells or Verne.

Thinking about these writers makes me wonder what is it about the surreal, or as I now prefer to call these works, Uncanny, that makes the short story form so ideal for them? I'm sure it's partly due to how they impact on our psyche. The Uncanny work draws so much of its strength from the fact that the works are so familiar to us, we know their settings and history so well already; almost! By using such a familiar context as it's background the Uncanny story rapidly establishes in our minds a familiar context with little need for preamble, this means that the true nature of the story can be rapidly created by the sudden jarring of this nature. All we need to know is that what we assumed to be solid ground is just dust beneath our feet.

Chambers colours his dust Yellow, a dark and sickly Yellow, Then he dares you to dirty yourself with that dust as you read it.