Thoughtless for the Day

"I tried to read 'Twilight' but it got boring, like, the second page. There are no pictures, so I'm not reading it." - Snooki

A few weeks ago, Vienna told me she'd had a dream in which a new horror movie was not only selling out in theaters but also causing its audience to go insane. Despite this, in her dream, Vienna was really psyched about seeing the film. I can't say I blame her as it did sound much more exciting than Avatar.

"I guess it was kind of like that episode of Masters of Horror, you know, Cigarette Burns." Vienna added, referencing a TV show in which a man searches for a lost film which causes everyone who comes in contact with it to lose their minds. Except, of course, for Udo Kier, who has been typecast as a nutjob since his first kindergarten play; so he just ended up wandering over to another section of the Disenchanted Kingdom.

"I imagine," I said (and these are the sorts on conversations that go on in our house), "that you could also make a case for the movie in your dream being like London After Midnight. After all, some guy strangled a woman in Hyde Park after seeing it; he claimed that Lon Chaney's make up drove him insane. And London After Midnight is a lost film, so that ties it to Cigarette Burns"

"Then," Vienna said, "you could also argue that the movie in my dream was like the book in The Mouth of Madness."

"Well, the plot of that movie was just a rip-off of The King in Yellow."

"The what?"

"The King in Yellow. It's a book about a book, also called The King in Yellow, that causes widespread insanity. I read it about twenty-five years ago, and I don't think that I've met anyone else who has ever read it. I think in was written between-the-wars, around 1920 or so: which is really creepy because one scene takes place in the 'future' New York of the 1930's, which has been ethnically cleansed, and is now free of 'all Semitic peoples'. Antisemitism wasn't just popular back then, it was endemic."

As it turned out, I was wrong (hey, it happens) about two things: The first was that The King in Yellow was not published in the 1920's, but in 1895: you'll find out why this is remarkable shortly. The second was that, in the book, all Semitic peoples are not banned from New York City in the 1930's. No, America just passes a law forbidding all foreign-born Jews from entering the country: which was actually a pretty liberal attitude for 1895; especially when you consider that it was that year when Alfred Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island.

The King in Yellow usually gets categorized as Horror fiction or, occasionally, as Fantasy, but I think the best to description is "just plain weird". The book is a collection of plays and short stories all loosely tied together by the King who can either an actual person, a book, or a symbol. While I highly recommend that you read all of the stories in the book, I implore you (I'm begging here) to read the first story in the book, The Repairer of Reputations (you can read it online here), which is a truly twisted tale that was decades ahead of its time, not only in its perspective on madness, but also for its ability to slowly build an atmosphere of terror while also creating a very convincing alternate history. It even manages to brilliantly juggle two competing narratives. And it did all of this thirty years before H.P. Lovecraft began putting pen to paper.

"In the following winter began the agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square." - From The Repairer of Reputations.

By the way, Robert W. Chambers, the author of The King in Yellow ended his career writing romance novels. Which, if you think about it, would be a much more appealing delivery system for mass madness than a horror novel. After all, there's something wonderfully joyous about the idea of a suburban mom reading The Viscount's Betrothal and then running amok with a meat cleaver.

Who knows, maybe Harlequin Romances or Chicken Soup for the Soul really are part of a secret plot to drive a large segment of the population crazy. How else could you explain this piece of spam that turned up in my inbox:

[Thanks, unknown spammer! Now Dr. Who and Viagra are forever linked in my mind.]

The again, I guess the idea of a book which could transform its readers into raving paranoid lunatics is a pretty far-fetched idea.