The King in Yellow and Other Stories: A President Lovecraft Weird Fiction Timeline in Several Acts
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Another random idea: since I like the idea of tying media updates to each of the timelines sections (and two of my addendums are outright concerned with media), I had a random idea for a novel inspired by the events I'll describe in The Gray Ghost that'll go on to have a cultural influence on par with Dracula OTL: The Mysterious Stranger; or Gone Like the Wind . Oliander Bedford Hume is going to be a goddamn monster, so his memory morphing into a supernatural horror makes perfect sense 😂
Got to move into a new place Saturday but I'll shoot for the Prismatic Dynasty/cosmic horror addendum Sunday if I can make time! I've also rethought the title, so it'll officially be The Prismatic Panic: A Cosmic Horror Addendum! Gotta give a bit more context for the moral panic of the Graham years after all.
The Prismatic Panic: A Cosmic Horror Postscript
It would stand to reason that a world where so many cosmic horror writers went into politics would be one with an immiserated cosmic horror tradition. While the rise of Miskasonic music and the related literary scene provides Watsonian evidence that this isn't true, it stems from a Doylist theory of mine that cosmic horror as a genre is an inevitability given historical conditions. Any recognizable America, caught between a lingering cultural inferiority complex and a worldview being rapidly reshaped by industrial modernity and related changes in scientific knowledge, is bound to create it as the forefront of capitalist accumulation. As a response to the alienation of modern life cosmic horror, to my mind, represents one of the two* organic American epic mythologies.
In The King in Yellow, the codifier of the (much looser) canon of the genre was William Dudley Pelley, who systematized Robert Chambers' own weird output with his own innovations and public domain concepts cribbed from other literary pioneers. This created an interesting inverse to our own situation, in that later authors tried to strip out Christian moralizing instead of adding** it. Following his death in 1953 the work of expanding the world he sought to shape would diffuse, becoming a vast reference pool sampled from and added to by alienated writers, artists and musicians across the Fascist world. The most notable outgrowth of this proliferation would be Miskasonic, but a robust literary scene would also continue through the latter half of the twentieth century aided and abetted by Silver Legion Press.
Originally a literary journal and publishing house founded by Pelley himself to preserve his own work and showcase new writers, the most dramatic leap forward by SLP would be the creation of the "Prismatic Dynasty", a pantheon of eldritch entities and their associated purviews, servitors, and grimoires. Tied together originally by a loose color association, later writers have attempted to add depth by linking them to the classical planets and attendant alchemical metals, and the idea that they represent a sequence of cosmic emanations***. Like Derleth's classical element Mythos association it doesn't always work, but writers use the explanation that primitive humans either misattributed the associations or just straight up misunderstood what traits and deities the planets really represented. Despite the existence of several pretenders, the Prismatic Dynasty proper is made up of seven members:
- Aten, the Shining Powers, began as Pelley's extrapolation of Hodgson's work. Originally meant to serve as a pseudo-Christian benevolent higher power, more recent authors have reinterpreted the Powers and their Silver Legion of crusading witch hunters and monster slayers as an embodiment of the terror of stagnant absolute order. A pillar of light orbited by rings of eyes, Aten is associated with gold and the Sun.
- Pan, the Green Knight, and his servitors, the White People of Deep Dendo and the metaphysically miscegenated Craddock family. Cribbed from Arthur Machen and combined with several Chambers works revolving around strange creatures, the Green Man and cohort revolve around the inherent savagery and ineffability of nature and the wild places. A monstrous chimeric satyr with a crown of antlers and bark for skin, Pan is associated with fleet and ever changing Mercury.
- Yue-Lao, the Cerulean Sage, drawn from Chambers' Maker of Moons, dwells on a hidden moonlet orbiting the Earth called Ereshkigal and is attended by a priesthood of wicked immortal sorcerers, the Xin. Representing the madness of perfect knowledge and tied up in Chambers' (and Pelley's) reactionary fears of communism, rapprochement with the Comintern has seen the latter aspect (along with the Sage's more noxious Yellow Peril imagery) thankfully discarded since the Jackson thaw. Humanesque but with starry voids for eyes and impossibly blue robes, Yue-Lao is associated with copped and bright venus.
- Alagadda, the Red Emperor, has perhaps changed the most from his origin as a synthesis of Poe's Red Death and Conqueror Worm, with more recent works shifting him from a general embodiment of death and warfare to a more pernicious entity representing the relentless erosive march of progress. A hanged man in blood drenched tatters and writhing with monstrous worms, Alagadda is associated with Luna and the space program along with (paradoxically enough) silver.
- Carcosa, the King in Yellow, his nightmarish city of the same name, and the decadent Castaigns are drawn most strongly from Chambers and Pelley's own work and presiding over decadence and a spiraling social decline into hedonistic madness. A man in luxurious but worn yellow robes and a pale featureless mask, Carcosa is associated with Mars (a planet destroyed by its own decadent civilization) and iron.
- Valis, the Pattern Juggler, is perhaps the most genuinely benevolent, though inscrutable. Taken from the works of Philip K. Dick, the Pattern Juggler has a tendency to share prophetic visions through the use of pink beams and has an extremely potent tendency to warp targets of its interest into fragile mirrored hypodimensional spaces resembling strange uchronia. A perfect sphere of eye searing magenta, Valis is commonly associated with the planet Jupiter (likewise warping space around itself) and tin.
- Nyx, the Black Queen of Night, was created to give a human(ish) face to William Hope Hodgson's Night Lands stories. Attended (in the present) by her Swine Things and (in the future) by her Abhumans, Nyx represents entropy and the inevitable death of the universe and appears as a featureless and all consuming black silhouette of a very pregnant woman, regardless of the angle she is seen from. She is associated with Saturn and lead.
In the Age of Fear SLP sought to to revitalize public interest in its corpus by funding a big budget anthology television series, The Murder Ballads****, which would devote one season each to a member of the Dynasty and revolve around a gritty detective story that would brush ambiguously against the mythos before diving headlong into madness and supernatural goings-on. The Long Bright Dark revolved around the Green Man and the ambiguously-human Craddock family, The Western Book of the Dead around the Red Emperor, The Great War and Modern Memory around the King in Yellow, and The Night Country around the Black Queen of Night. Though as of yet unreleased, fans eagerly await new seasons dealing with the Pattern Juggler, Cerulean Sage and the Shining Powers.
*The other, of course, being superheroes.
**Looking hard at you, Derleth!
***Some writers even use the concept that they are stages of the complete mental collapse of a single entity, the Peacock Angel, that exists outside of time, explaining how the Dynasts are all coterminous with one another despite being essentially stages of cosmic grief for the same abomination.
****The original title for True Detective OTL.
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It would stand to reason that a world where so many cosmic horror writers went into politics would be one with an immiserated cosmic horror tradition. While the rise of Miskasonic music and the related literary scene provides Watsonian evidence that this isn't true, it stems from a Doylist theory of mine that cosmic horror as a genre is an inevitability given historical conditions. Any recognizable America, caught between a lingering cultural inferiority complex and a worldview being rapidly reshaped by industrial modernity and related changes in scientific knowledge, is bound to create it as the forefront of capitalist accumulation. As a response to the alienation of modern life cosmic horror, to my mind, represents one of the two* organic American epic mythologies.
In The King in Yellow, the codifier of the (much looser) canon of the genre was William Dudley Pelley, who systematized Robert Chambers' own weird output with his own innovations and public domain concepts cribbed from other literary pioneers. This created an interesting inverse to our own situation, in that later authors tried to strip out Christian moralizing instead of adding** it. Following his death in 1953 the work of expanding the world he sought to shape would diffuse, becoming a vast reference pool sampled from and added to by alienated writers, artists and musicians across the Fascist world. The most notable outgrowth of this proliferation would be Miskasonic, but a robust literary scene would also continue through the latter half of the twentieth century aided and abetted by Silver Legion Press.
Originally a literary journal and publishing house founded by Pelley himself to preserve his own work and showcase new writers, the most dramatic leap forward by SLP would be the creation of the "Prismatic Dynasty", a pantheon of eldritch entities and their associated purviews, servitors, and grimoires. All united by a color association, most common versions of the Dynasty include the following:
Originally focused on literature, SLP would expand into tabletop roleplaying games and other media, eventually putting them square in the sights of the Graham Administration and other social conservatives. While many Populists could stomach the Dynasty while the Shining Powers were explicitly Christian, the shift after Pelley toward a less anthropocentric morality raised an ire that only grew through the 60s and 70s. The Prismatic Dynasty would become a focal point of the so-called "Prismatic Panic" of the Graham years, with widespread fears among social conservatives of witchcraft and satanism in schools and public life, though the company (and the genre) would only find itself more popular from the countercultural backlash against such moralizing overreach.
- The King in Yellow and his court at Carcosa, drawn most strongly from Chambers and Pelley's own work and presiding over decadence and a spiraling social decline into hedonistic madness.
- The Green Man and his servitors, the White People of Deep Dendo. Cribbed from Arthur Machen*** and combined with several Chambers works revolving around strange creatures, the Green Man and cohort revolve around the inherent savagery and ineffability of nature and the wild places.
- The Cerulean Sage, drawn from Chambers' Maker of Moons, dwells on a hidden moonlet orbiting the Earth called Ereshkigal and was attended by a priesthood of wicked immortal sorcerers. Representing the madness of perfect knowledge and tied up in Chambers' (and Pelley's) reactionary fears of communism, rapprochement with the Comintern has seen the latter aspect (along with the Sage's more noxious Yellow Peril imagery) thankfully discarded since the Jackson thaw.
- The Red Emperor has perhaps changed the most from his origin as a synthesis of Poe's Red Death and Conqueror Worm, with more recent works shifting him from a general embodiment of death and warfare to a more pernicious entity representing the relentless erosive march of progress.
- The Black Queen of Night was created to give a human(ish) face to William Hope Hodgson's Night Lands stories. Attended (in the present) by her Swine Things and (in the future) by her Abhumans, Nyx represents entropy and the inevitable death of the universe.
- The Shining Powers began as Pelley's extrapolation of Hodgson's work. Originally meant to serve as a pseudo-Christian benevolent higher power, more recent authors have reinterpreted the Powers and their Silver Legion of crusading witch hunters and monster slayers as an embodiment of the terror of stagnant absolute order.
In the Age of Fear SLP sought to to revitalize public interest in its corpus by funding a big budget anthology television series, The Murder Ballads****, which would devote one season each to a member of the Dynasty and revolve around a gritty detective story that would brush ambiguously against the mythos before diving headlong into madness and supernatural goings-on. The Long Bright Dark revolved around the Green Man and the ambiguously-human Craddock family, The Western Book of the Dead around the Red Emperor, The Great War and Modern Memory around the King in Yellow, and The Night Country around the Black Queen of Night. Though as of yet unreleased, fans eagerly await new seasons dealing with the Cerulean Sage and the Shining Powers.
*The other, of course, being superheroes.
**Looking hard at you, Derleth!
***The Green Man is Machen's Pan, for example.
****The original title for True Detective OTL.
Nicely done
Much obliged! While there are far fewer cosmic entities there are plenty of races, monsters and evil wizards, many new ones but also plenty extrapolated from one off mentions in older stories like what that Yellow King rpg did with Chambers or otherwise taken from stories that never got the nod from the OTL Mythos. Also in a similar vein to the Call of Cthulhu rpg there is some controversy about how interwoven the public domain stuff is with the concepts SLP has a copyright on, seen to potentially box in unaffiliated contributors.
Thank you so much! I always enjoy when people like my weird stuff 😂
What would you like to know? I'm always happy to take questions
Werewolves are primarily popular in the Comintern owing to a divergence in popular tastes in the West and a different stable of monsters used in the equivalent of the old Universal movies focused on a more Egyptian/Arabic direction*. While what we'd call "classic" werewolf stories exist as period pieces in the Comintern (with Werewolf of Paris-style socialist undertones, of course!), stories set in the modern day take more of a science fiction tack rooted in an earlier AH twin of the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer concept. Lots of stuff about psychosocial atavism and so forth. There isn't a World of Darkness rpg as such but the analogue to the Underworld movies included monster archetypes from the both sides of the old Iron Curtain and have a similar vibe. Hitler's myth cycle was Tolkein-esque high fantasy popular in the AfD, though the Dwarves were the evil aggressor race, the Elves were a representation of the pinnacle of Western (European) civilization, and the Orcs were a rough and mongrelized but ultimately honorable race commonly seen as an only slightly unflattering reference to the Fascists. Good in a fight but very tense neighbors, you know?
*Something vaguely similar to this:
I've had a lingering nagging thought since I posted it that I should add another member of the Dynasty so that the Shining Powers could be the more significant number seven in the pantheon 🤔 Off the top of my head I'm thinking Philip K. Dick's VALIS, with the associated color pink, though I'm struggling for a suitable color-themed epithet for it. I introduced it in the part about The Man in the High Castle so it's not even like it's a new import to the TL. In my conception it would represent transcendent enlightenment, allowing the Dynasty to be ordered on a scale of cosmic emanations or something:
*Maybe I could call it "The Pattern Juggler" as a nod to the song and the entity's tendency of manifesting across dimensions?
- The Shining Powers would be at the top (or bottom), representing pure cosmic order
- The Green Man would be next, representing the chaotic natural world that springs from it.
- Next the Cerulean Sage seeking perfect forbidden knowledge of the universe
- Then the Red Emperor, the unholy fruit of that knowledge
- The King in Yellow would symbolize decadence undermining civilization
- VALIS* the transcendence on the other side of that descent into madness
- And finally Nyx to snuff the whole thing out
*Maybe I could call it "The Pattern Juggler" as a nod to the song and the entity's tendency of manifesting across dimensions?
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How is animation as a medium doing? What's Disney up to? Fleischer Studios?
I'd argue that there's a couple of others-- Tall Tales, and the Western genre. But that's something to be discussed elsewhere.