Carcosa and The King in Yellow ~ True Detective and American Literature

I loved the HBO Series "True Detective" because it was as darkly Southern Gothic as it could be, and you could write several books just on the use of religious symbolism in the plot. They really went all the way with every character, especially the flawed and misunderstood Rust Cohle who is becomes identical to Jesus by the end, scarred by a knife wound (like a Roman sword) and resurrected after the battle against the evil killer Childress in the Coliseum-like Carcosa, sitting up in bed like the figure from the Shroud of Turin with a large computer tablet beside him that resembles a Bible on a pulpit, Rust transforms into the Light of the World. And of course in the end he explains to his friend Marty that he really did die and go to heaven where he felt the love of his daughter (and his Father) but was sent back to earth again again for reasons he didn't understand. But I totally understood and enjoyed all the religious symbolism, having grown up a Southern Baptist.



However, the English Major in me kept wondering who the "Yellow King" was, and where did the name "Carcosa"  come from? I racked my brain from William Faulkner to Shakespeare, but could remember nothing on those two references.

Well, it turns out there is a long literary tradition about both the Yellow King and Carcosa, and it goes back to two American writers: Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers.

Ambrose Bierce wrote the story called "An Inhabitant of Carcosa."
Read it Here

The King in Yellow Wikia Site has a snippet about the Ambrose Bierce connection:

Ambrose Bierce's tale An Inhabitant of Carcosa is arguably the wellspring of the whole Yellow Mythos. It employs an exoticism of setting unusual for the author, and sprang from the alienation that dogged Bierce all his life. The story's genesis came from a terrible dream he had in his youth, in which he wandered through a blasted landscape and entered a colossal, deserted castle. The castle's dusty, echoing corriders filled him with the feeling that the entire universe was long extinct:

Man is long ages dead in every zone
The angels all are gone to graves unknown
The devils, too, are cold enough at last
And God lies dead before the great white throne.

In this cosmic tomb, young Ambrose found a bed on which lay a horribly decayed corpse. The cadaver's eyes opened, and Bierce saw, to his horror, that they were his own: "That hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient after the death of God and his angels, was I!"

That story by Bierce inspired Robert Chambers, who in 1895 wrote a collection of short stories that mention a play called "The King in Yellow." The place-name "Carcosa" is mentioned in the epigraph to the story collection as an excerpt from the fictional play.

Free eBook Here on Project Gutenberg

THE KING IN YELLOW
BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Original publication date: 1895

THE KING IN YELLOW
IS DEDICATED
TO
MY BROTHER

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

Cassilda's Song in "The King in Yellow," Act i, Scene 2.

Rust Enters the Ruins of Carcosa


More from the University of Texas

Journalist and short-story writer Ambrose Bierce wrote the horror story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” in 1886. The story explores death, light, and darkness and is about a man who awakens from a sickness-induced sleep to find himself lost in an unfamiliar wilderness. Sound familiar?
. . . Writer Robert W. Chambers borrows the name of Ambrose’s ancient city, Carcosa, and builds it into a mysterious and cursed city in his collection of short stories The King in Yellow. The stories in the book are linked by a fictional play of the same name, which induces despair and insanity in those who read it or see it performed. Considered “weird fiction” under the subgenre of speculative fiction, Chamber’s The King in Yellow has inspired many writers, including H. P. Lovecraft.

In "The Call of the Cthulu" by Lovecraft there's even a Louisiana connection in this passage about an Inspector Legrasse out of New Orleans who goes out in the Bayou to investigate some type of Voodoo worship of the First Evil Cthulu (which is something like the "Green Spaghetti Monster" mentioned in True Detective):

On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypus thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.

. . . In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ringshaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

And if there's still any doubt that True Detective has deep literary roots, the screenwriter of True Detective himself has mentioned that Chambers/Bierce were indeed his sources, although not his favorite writers. Instead, he was merely inspired by the American mythos of the names involved. And he also suggests checking out Faulkner and Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness" to be sure), plus the Holy Bible, too, so my own analysis was pretty close to what he intended. :)

From HitFix

. . . you wrote this entire thing in a vacuum, as someone relatively new to television, not knowing how it was received. And the show comes on, and people go nuts about it, they are penning raves, coming up with elaborate theories about the Yellow King and Lovecraft and everything else. How did it feel to see your creation being received in all of these ways?

Nic Pizzolatto: I felt like, look, it's all good, and I really mean that. To me, that is what it means to connect and resonate with people. It means that they are going to project onto the work. There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it. That said, I think I've made clear that my only interest in the Chambers stuff (Robert W. Chambers wrote "The King in Yellow") is as a story that has a place in American myth. And it's a story about a story that drives people into madness. That was mainly it. Beyond that, I'm interested in the atmosphere of cosmic horror, but that's about all I have to say about weird fiction. I did feel the perception was tilted more towards weird fiction than perhaps it should have been. For instance, if someone needs a book to read along with season 1 of "True Detective," I would recommend the King James Old Testament. I wouldn't tell anyone to go buy Robert Chambers. It's not that great a book. Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner I think are in there far more than Chambers or Lovecraft. But again, I guess I hope that these 8 chapters, once the totality of it is evident, it might provoke a re-evaluation. But if it doesn't, I'm very happy with the reaction we've had. It couldn't have been better. I'm just surprised by it. I remember talking to you three months ago and having to convince you: "This just sounds like every other show," "I know, I know." And now my wife read a comment the other day that said I live out in the desert, and I run some kind of cult. (laughs) I don't know what I can say about that. I think this show answers everything it told you to ask. The questions it didn't tell you to ask are questions best left to one's self.

Scholastic Unveils New Harry Potter Cover

Here is the new cover and I love the way Diagon Alley looks with the textured cobblestones, candles, and crooked buildings of ancient age, but I don't quite understand the two people with rabbit ears and faces. After quite a bit of discussion on Harry Potter Network, we decided that the rabbit people are supposed to be Goblins from Gringotts, even though it never says in the books or on Pottermore that they have pointy ears. Yet JKR made a drawing from HP and the Sorcerer's Stone that showed a goblin with pointed ears, and we know she was involved with the way they appear in the movies. In the books, it is actually House Elves that have pointed large "bat-like" ears, but maybe all these little people are connected in some way.

The new artist, Kazu Kibuishi, has done several interviews:

From Publisher's Weekly:

The new artwork is by Kazu Kibuishi ... creator of the bestselling graphic novel series Amulet (Scholastic/Graphix). “Initially I didn’t want to see it done,” Kibuishi told PW, “because I love the original covers so much. I’m a huge fan. But after thinking about it for a while, I figured if someone were going to do it, I should try it.”
. . . Kibuishi believes he may have it a bit easier than Mary GrandPré, the artist who created the original U.S. covers for the Harry Potter books. “I have the advantage of seeing the books in historical context,” Kibuishi says. However, he notes that he has put pressure on himself, wanting to live up to GrandPré’s example. “I’ve never worked so hard on single images in my life!” he says. “I’m an author as well and I know how much work I put into my own covers, so I thought ‘this [the Harry Potter project] won’t be bad.’ But when I came to do it, I realized how much more this project meant to me. I want to get it right.”

Via Snitchseeker

What was your inspiration for the new cover for ‘Sorcerer's Stone’?
Kibuishi: That one was the clearest cover for me to do. It probably best signifies the idea of Harry becoming a new perennial classic. I feel like over time [Harry Potter] is going to be looked at like we look at a Dickens novel or a Wells novel. I wanted to give the covers that classic look. It was like I was doing almost a kind of fan art of Harry Potter, but done in the style of classic literature. The initial cover was very Dickens. I was thinking of “Great Expectations” or “A Christmas Carol.” I have a film background and I’m a big fan of movie poster. It’s probably reflective of some of my favorite movie posters as well.

Did you use artist Mary GrandPre’s work as a jumping off point?
Kibuishi: Her work stands alone in its own way. They are like icons….As I said, I came at it as more as an art historian. Taking a look at how we have sort of accepted Harry into our culture and trying to invent it for a new generation of readers. I tried to sever as many ties as I could and try to think about it from a completely fresh perspective while paying respect to the work that came before.
I made stylistic tributes to Mary’s work. There are little elements and flourishes that I probably wouldn’t have done myself, but they’re so subtle, in the technique that I’m not sure someone would notice.

~~~ More At Link . . .

Freebie: Short Stories by Sherwood Anderson Read Aloud by Famous Writers

From Library of America and free from to your ears in celebration of the great short-story writer Sherwood Anderson: writers reading short stories for your listening pleasure.

Click Here to Start Listening

Sherwood Anderson remade the short story for the modern era. Exploring the hidden recesses of small town life, his haunting, understated, often sexually frank stories revolutionized the tone of American storytelling. Without Anderson’s example, the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck, McCullers, Mailer, and Kerouac is almost unthinkable.

The Library of America edition of Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories gathers—for the first time in a single volume—all the story collections Anderson published during his lifetime: Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933), along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death. (Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories is also available as an e-book in all major formats.)

To celebrate this milestone edition of an essential American writer, The Library of America presents some of today’s leading short story writers reading their favorite Anderson stories from the collection.

10 Books to fill the Post-Election Void

Are you a political junkie feeling restless now that the election excitement is over? Are you craving the intrigue of smoke-filled war rooms and rousing populist speeches, but have to settle for C-Span or MSNBC? Or maybe you just want to know what the heck happened for the past three months?

Let me help you ~ here are ten books about politics, candidates and campaigns with all the electioneering you crave, plus a big boost of history to put everything about 2012 in context. Some are about the left, some about the right, but all are fascinating.

Note: Both links and pictures will take you directly to Amazon.

1.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't
Numbers guy Nate Silver is either a hero or villain depending on your political views. Starting out as a progressive diarist on Daily Kos then rising to New York Times blogger status, he correctly predicted the outcome of both the 2008 and 2012 down to the exact states and number of electoral votes won by Obama, McCain, and Romney. While other statisticians may claim the same success, Silver was the most outspoken on the internet both times, which made him a lighting rod for criticism from all sides.

2.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin gives behind-the-scenes details about the White House of President Abraham Lincoln. This is a great book if you crave more Lincoln after watching the movie of the same name, which comes out in theaters Nov. 16.

3.
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
This book by Republican writers John Heilemann and Mark Halperin gives you the two-fold story of the 2008 presidential race, starting with Hillary Clinton's tough primary fight against Barack Obama, then moving on to John McCain's stunning pick of running mate Sarah Palin and all the drama that followed.

4.
The Selling of the President: The Classical Account of the Packaging of a Candidate
In this age of 24-hour television, we forget that at one time voters had no idea they were being subjected to marketing ploys thought up by Mad Men types. Author Joe McGinniss was the first to expose how presidential candidates are "packaged" for the public. Learn how Roger Ailes, who went on to be president of Fox News, was once just a TV producer trying to put a better and more voter-friendly face on Richard Nixon.

5.
The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown
The long, long lines of the 2012 campaign made everyone wonder why some states run elections so smoothly while others are in a big mess. Author Richard Hasen was an adviser to the Al Gore campaign during the 2000 recount fiasco in Florida and has made it his mission in life to parse and explain our rather byzantine voting system.

6.
Why Romney Lost
Republican pundit David Frum believes Mitt Romney lost through a combination of factors, but mainly because the candidate and party were seen as out of touch with a new diverse America. But he has suggestions for how to fix that in coming elections.

8.
1948: Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and the Year that Transformed America
If we think 2012 was a wild ride, then consider the election battle of 1948 with President Roosevelt's successor Harry Truman running in a primary against previous VP Henry Wallace and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. In the general election, the race was so close that some newspapers made the now-famous mistake of reporting that Thomas Dewey had won instead.

7.
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
This is probably the most even-handed look at the divisive Tea Party to date. Authors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson of Harvard University took time to interview ordinary people across America who identify with the Tea Party movement, which is based on the premise that half of society pays taxes to give "free stuff" to the other half. Whether you are part of the elite 1% or the more common 47%, this book is enlightening.

9.
Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent
E.J. Dionne is a liberal, but he tries to strike a balance here while explaining the causes of our "divided" government. This is also a good book to read if you know nothing about politics but are planning to vote in the next presidential election. How did things ever get so confusing?

10.
Presidential Campaign Posters: Two Hundred Years of Election Art
This coffee-table book put out by the Library of Congress is a lush look at campaign art, plus each of the 100 political posters may be removed from the book and framed. There is also ample backstory for each election. The message - candidates haven't changed much over the decades - they just want you to vote for them!

Shirley Jackson: Life Among the Savages

One of my favorite books while growing up was Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson, a chronicle of an unusual mother raising four boisterous children in a decrepit house in rural Vermont. Since the book is so humorous, I didn't realize that the author also wrote horror stories until I was in high school and read "The Lottery," which is Jackson's most famous story about a small town that turns against someone in a brutal and shocking way.

 According to the Bennington, Vermont, Village Website:

On a bright spring morning in 1948, she walked down the Prospect hill with a baby stroller for a round of village errands. An hour or so later, Shirley Jackson pushed the stroller up the hill with newspapers, the mail, groceries -- and a story in mind. Once home, she set her toddler into the playpen and wrote "The Lottery" in less than two hours. It was posted to her agent that evening, and published in The New Yorker three weeks later (June 28, 1948).
The story created an immediate uproar. "The Lottery" describes a communal rite in a tidy Yankee village quite like the author's own. As generations of readers were shocked to learn, community order in the fictional village is nourished by solstice blood. The New Yorker's inbox was filled with complaints and subscription cancellations. Shirley Jackson became a national sensation.

Jackson is also known for her creepy novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle, so it probably comes as a surprise to some readers that she had a very domesticated life as an eccentric stay-at-home mother married to a snarky college professor.


In Life Among the Savages, and again in the sequel, Raising Demons, the voice is not that of the perfect mother stereotype of the 50s and 60s - her children and critics alike agree on that point. According to her biography Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer, which I highly recommend, Shirley drank every afternoon, often lost track of just where her children were, and was surely not the world's best housekeeper - but then she never claimed to be. In some ways she reminds me of Betty Draper from Mad Men, classically educated and intelligent, leaning towards plump after childbearing, definitely living in the over-sized gothic house. But unlike the rather shallow and perfectly coiffed Betty, as well as the Donna Reeds and Mary Tyler Moores depicted on TV at that time as motherly stereotypes, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only woman at that time in Bennington Vermont who also had a job that paid money. She was a writer. And she was a famous writer of unusual talent - the Stephen King of her day. Yes she made tuna casserole, sorted socks and cleaned out drawers, but then she would sit down at a typewriter, light a cigarette, and write amazing stories for the Saturday Evening Post and Harper's.


Pages from Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer
About one thing there's no doubt: Shirley Jackson enjoyed the hell out of being a mother, and she was rather ahead of her time in writing down exactly what her children were saying and doing, no matter how odd or unnerving that was. She wasn't afraid of being honest, so her dialogue is timeless, and that makes these stories of family life refreshing even today.

...Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books.

...There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside; there was another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humouredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into and upon and next to one another; one of them kept bats and we shut that one up completely; another, light and cheerful in spite of its one small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became, without any decision of ours, a place to store things temporarily, things that were moved regularly, like sledges and snow shovels and garden rakes and hammocks. The basement had an old clothes-line hung across it, and after the line I put up in the backyard had fallen down for the third time I resigned myself and put up a new line in the basement, and clothes dried there quickly and freshly.

...From the girl's room, small voices rose in song and I listened happily, thinking how pleasant it was to hear a brother and two sisters playing affectionately together; then, suddenly, the words of the song penetrated into my hot mind, and I was out of bed in one leap and racing down the hall. "Baby ate a spider, Baby ate a spider," was what they were singing.

...Sometimes in my capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them; I remember the little shock of familiarity I felt when I first saw Jannie skip down the front walk, and the sense of lost years slipping past, unrealized, when Laurie came home chanting "O-U-T spells out, and out you go, down to the bottom of the deep blue sea, with a dirty dishrag turned inside out" . . .

Of Rockets and Dandelion Wine ~ RIP Ray Bradbury

I'm so sad to hear that Ray Bradbury, great American writer, has passed. Bradbury had a huge impact on all of us who grew up in the seventies. As a teenager you couldn't walk down the hall in school without seeing someone carrying around a dog-eared and beloved Ray Bradbury book - and I was one of them, a huge fan. The science-fiction may seem dated or naive to kids today, but the language and poetry of Ray Bradbury will live on forever, like that taste of dandelion wine lingering on your tongue or the feel of those Cream-Sponge Para-Litefoot tennis shoes.

He loved libraries and many of his plotlines are a litany of book titles and literary quotes.

"Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

That is obviously why he found the idea of censorship to the point of burning books to be the most dangerous idea, and he expresses that in his ironicaly but often-banned Fahrenheit 451. It is one of the classics of the 20th century, right up there with Catch-22 in capturing the hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism of modern life, and is still being taught in high schools around the world. We may forget how political it is. In the following quote the character could be talking about attitudes of this election year, the Tea Party versus the Liberals.

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.  
... There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind.
...If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.

Bradbury was the master of the short story as well, thrilling readers with such masterpieces as "The Veldt" or "The April Witch," or "Fog Horn." Bradbury certainly had a way with titles from "The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit" to "A Medicine for Meloncholy," to "Boys Raise Giant Mushrooms in YOUR Cellar." He was like a cross between John-Boy Walton and Rod Serling, one minute wallowing in homespun nostalgia, the next dragging you into a Mexican cemetery to confront a row of death heads and the Grim Reaper.

The picture above is Bradbury's own painting of The Halloween Tree

He did what every great writer does - writing from his own experiences then expanding out to the universe, and that leap into the unknown was Bradbury's gift. He was that boy who ran like a gazelle through the wheat fields and ravines of rural Green Town, Illinois, under the shade of a million trees - the boy fascinated by lightning rods, carnival barkers, dusty books, and the history and mysteries of Halloween. But he is also the "Rocket Man" who channeled the Martian landscape to the point that we could taste that red dust. The boy heard the train whistle at night and wondered what his life would become. The adult writer imagined a lonely train stop where no one got off except himself, and then only for the strangest of reasons. RIP, Sir, in your October Country or out among the stars in your "Million Year Picnic."