THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition), is indeed deluxe and handsome to look at!

THE KING IN YELLOW (Deluxe edition)
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
Pushkin Press Classics
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending August 4, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers is a classic collection of weird tales that has captivated readers since its original publication in 1895. The stories in this collection are linked by the mysterious play "The King in Yellow," a fictional drama that drives those who read it to madness and despair. Set against the backdrop of a beautifully detailed yet unsettling world, the stories explore themes of existential dread, the supernatural, and the fragility of the human mind.

This illustrated edition not only brings the haunting prose to life but also offers captivating illustrations that enhance the eerie atmosphere of Chambers' tales. Alongside the stories, readers will find a summary of the collection, a biography of the author, and a comprehensive list of characters, providing further insight into the dark and mysterious world of The King in Yellow.

Chambers' masterful storytelling and exploration of the unknown have earned this collection a place in the genre of weird fiction, influencing later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft. This edition is perfect for fans of Gothic horror, supernatural fiction, and anyone who enjoys a chilling tale that lingers long after the last page is turned.

Whether you're reading for the first time or revisiting these tales, this edition of The King in Yellow offers a deeper connection to the eerie and the unknown, complemented by stunning illustrations that capture the essence of Chambers' haunting world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A collection of two halves, one being "The King in Yellow" sequence of gothic, eerie tales centering on the eponymous entity in art or (sur)reality; two stories set in Chambers' home country of the US (marked *) and two in the fin de siècle's default setting for perversity, Paris (marked **). These form what deels like a failed novel; like Chambers was heading for a larger goal but, for whatever reason, chose not to go there. I wondered if he simply lost interest once he thought to set the stories acrually *in* Paris, Sodom on the Seine working its decadent way on him as much as on his characters.

The remaining stories are only occasionally tinged with gothic overtones. They tend more towards romantic fiction in the older sense. They're not about modern concerns with coupling up and finding love, they're about the grand emotional sweeps and swoops of Romanticism. It's all very beautifully presented by Pushkin Press in this Deluxe edition.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the nine stories are herein dealt with by the Bryce Method of a short response to the story, a rating of it on its own, and the collection's gestalt being the overall rating.

**The Repairer of Reputations limns the iea of "have you found the Yellow Sign?" into your awareness. It is a strange, haunting, unsettling thing this sogn; it plays on arrogant narcissism ("Mr. Wilde" eh?) to induce paranoia which becomes the impetus for seeking it and the punishment fo seeking it at the same time. Deeply disturbing, very humidly told. 4.5*

*The Mask brings in the play "The King in Yellow," merely reading it will send a person into a spiral of madness! It unhinges all who dare to open it! Talk about a sales job, there's no better way to get huge sales for something than this except maybe banning it on grounds of immorality.

The sufferings of the artist who, drawn to experience these extreme things for Love (of course), mesh with weird period-appropriate pseudoscience in a fun but very, very 1890s way. 4.5*

*In the Court of the Dragon is so flippin' bizarre...why does the old weirdo want the guy's soul? What's the way he knows the guy's soul is of such interest and value? I fear this line of mental inquiry is why I'm just not a gothic-story habitué, but it's sure got the trappings of the best ones! 4*

**The Yellow Sign a coffin worm?!? *shudder* 4*

The Demoiselle d'Ys tells a very charming, if kind of trite in the twenty-first century, time-travel romance (in our modern usage). Left a mildly pleasant but very indistinct impression on me. 3*

The Prophets' Paradise compiles a series of prose poems that expand on the love, hubris, and dangerous supernatural bargaining of the first four stories' characters. Seems odd to me not to put it *within* those stories but permaybehaps Author Chambers didn't think of these small moments in time to do so...expanding the quotation from "The King in Yellow" that open the cycle's stories. 3.75*

The Street of the Four Winds is a Parisian tragic story in the era's typical style, with ruin and disaster following on from following a neighbor's cat. Very apt. 3*

The Street of the First Shell tells a deeply sorrowful tale set during the Siege of Paris (1870 through 1871), with tragic results from terrible decisions and awful actions forced by the cruelest of fates. 3.75* despite the melodrama (or because of it, NGL)

The Street of Our Lady of the Fields is another "bohemians bohemianing unoriginally across the dirty foreign streets of dirty foreign Paris' dirty foreign immoral soil." Spare me. 2.5*

Rue Barrée see above, only the story's as sick of the story as I am. Made it more fun to read. 3*
It's a beautiful object, and will no doubt be welcome for decorative value. I think many a gothic-story reader will get one, and that will be its fate. Sometimes it's not great to meet your heroes in person.

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel, look into some meanings of "genius" before leaping to conclusions

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant novel about a young woman’s quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be married to Drew, a man who says he loves her. But Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered when a woman she knows is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die—or kill—for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full knowledge that each breath is bringing her closer to her final breath?

Before Celia knows it her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range. She's searching for a love tryst of her very own. She's thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir about obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life for herself.

Claire Oshetsky is also the author of the novels Poor Deer and Chouette, which was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm an Oshetsky fan. Chouette and Poor Deer (review links above) were excellent reads for a lover of storytelling that blends noir and surreal and pieces of stream-of-consciousness. I'm here for the women who, for varying reasons not least including men being obliviously privileged and uniformly clueless, don't get their feet under themselves. Identities are always under construction, never more so than when the identity is most rigidly brandished at the world. Those like "my Drew" as our PoV character, Celia, thinks of her controlling husband, are fragile masks that must constantly be reinforced...at Celia's expense in this case. It's not an uncommon trait, this...I was the raw material from which my mother's controlling abuse drew her rigidity, masked her awfulness from outsiders.

In this tale of obsession, cruelty, and how we create ourselves in response to outside pressures meeting a core of resistance, and how very much pressure that can require. Celia does not seem aware of how deep her well of rage is. Celia, under "my Drew" as lord and master, touches that rage at last...she has the example of her quite spectacularly murdered co-worker to create urgency in her feelings about "my Drew." It is a spiral up, from touching the rage and the hatred in her to dreamimg of murdering him with a nail file to the ear to taking a ride home from an attractive stranger on her commuter train to buying a weapon to taking the initiative to set up a meeting with a man she's never met but deals with on the phone a lot. It's clear the cork's popped on a lifetime of swallowed emotional abuse and neglect and victimization.

And she's only nineteen.

What keeps me Oshetskying every time I can is Celia and her half-siblings who are all Author Claire's brain children. I find new ways to enjoy off-the-beam points of view with each story she writes. Here's Celia in progress: "What Drew didn’t know is that I couldn’t be shamed that way. Not any longer...I would never again let myself be shamed by my body, or its functions, or its urges." Brava, kid! You're only nineteen and light-years ahead of most people's final destinations. It's of a piece with Celia's object of fetishization, the Barbie doll. It requires no huge leap to see how a bizarre doll...collection...stands in for the need to discover safety, and how little actual use it is. How little it takes, a few ounces of plastic molded into a distorted human shape, to buy a sham safety from the very real storms around her, these golems of industrial feminization in their legions pacifying the susceptible intentional victims with their infinite manipulability (plasticity in its original sense.).

Author Claire doesn't say this. That would be rude. Author Claire might be rowdy but she is not rude. Her ability to slit the character envelope with a rapier of witty, unsentimental observation while releasing the evil genius inside Celia to perform the real function of protection is *chef's kiss*. I've seen a few reviews that interpret the title in a more comic-book way, resembling a supervillain; I suppose that's inevitable as this is what most people are familiar with. It is, however, not at all what the story delivers, whereas I see the genius loci in every shred of this story's fabric. Follow the link above after reading Evil Genius to see if you find similar echoes.

It's a rare thing for me to say: I wish I could forget this story entirely so I could read it for the first time all over again. I want to re-meet Doggo. And Celia. (Not Sock Man, though.)

PARADISE LOGIC, assured debut of surreal, chaotic young-adulthood's identity crisis

PARADISE LOGIC
SOPHIE KEMP
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.

It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly.

When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest.

At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her life: Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: As an exploration of obsession, of the cultural freight of misogyny and its patriarchal messaging, this story disturbed me. Paradise's obsessions are so spot-on for a twentysomething, all centering external validation for her exterior qualities and ignoring the void where she, herself..her Self...needs to go. She's following the script her gender presentation hands her, beats her with, from birth. Ariel will love her if she's the perfect girlfriend, of course he will.

Never mind he loves his crack habit more than he even notices her. Never mind she only hared off on this quest to become a girlfriend at all because her fuckbuddy Emil plants the idea in her mind..."When I looked down at Emil’s cell phone I would always see a message that said: LOL JUST RIPPED A FAT 1. And then Emil would respond by saying: 'Mashallah, my brother,' even though Sikh is not the same as Muslim and also Emil was a Filipino atheist"...never mind she loves making art and creating zines more than the airhead Ariel the wannabe, but never will be, Assyriologist. She's so open to the world and its experiences that she loses sight of the shore. No wonder this quest results in her downward spiral into weird Stepford-wife trial drugs and enduring sexual abuse.

Surreal, but rooted in a reality I remember all too well, Reality...or Valerie as she was named by her mother...feels like the right narrator to tell me this story of rootless identity and unformed selfhood in a modern context that feels so malign as to make this a horror story. Her blithe breathless narrative voice even feels like that of other twentysomething seekers I've known, mostly female. She is doing what women have had, have been forced, to do for millennia: muddling through, making the best of it.

In many ways a funny and heartfelt account of figuring yourself out, on most others an addled nightmare of not knowing how, when, and where to set boundaries, the real pleasure of this read is its gonzo narrative voice and its relatable struggles toward real selfhood: “You’re making a commitment. A boyfriend I have heard is a lifelong commitment. Once you have one you’re never the same. You become a girlfriend. This is a fixed identity. I didn’t have one of those yet.”

A read for Yuletide's unmoored, unsettled liminal space, to remind older folks of just how hard it is and how easy to make foolish mistakes in that state; how much patience is a gift and how much a con game.

Parents strongly urged to read; and cautioned it won't be comfortable all the time. It will be funny, though.

CHOUETTE, a surrealist novel with an amazing tale to tell

CHOUETTE
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco Press
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis
Tiny is pregnant. Her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.”

When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother.

Arresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You can't find my interest in the Cult of Mother with a scanning electron microscope. I dislike the smugness of Mothers who define themselves by the fruits of their uterus. I am routinely revolted and infuriated by the seemingly inevitable bad, lazy, underinvolved fathers these Noble Mothers are saddled with. (Who chose him? Could it just possibly be you, your behavior, your expectations are at fault, Mother?)

Why in the hell did I ask for, then read this book?!

Because we're not on the rails leading to Vaginaville by way of Labor Creek, that's why. This book posits a half-owl, half-human baby born of lesbian bestiality committed in a dream. (Not a spoiler, that's literally the first page of the read.)

I dream I’m making tender love with an owl. The next morning I see talon marks across my chest that trace the path of my owl-lover’s embrace. Two weeks later I learn that I’m pregnant.

You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl?

I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.
                                                    * * *
As for you, owl-baby, let’s lay out the facts. Your owlness is with you from the very beginning. It’s there when a first cell becomes two, four, eight. It’s there when you sleep too much, and crawl too late, and when you bite when you aren’t supposed to bite, and shriek when you aren’t supposed to shriek; and on the day that you are born—on the day when I first look down on your pinched-red, tiny-clawed, outraged little body lying naked and intubated in a box—I won’t have the slightest idea about who you are, or what I will become.

But there you will be, and you will be of me.

Right there, that voice makes my readar ping like it's locked onto an approaching asteroid. This? This is weird trip and I am here to take it.

What doesn't make me coo with delight is the rather stark presentation of her husband and his family. I did, however, get many evil-hearted chuckles at their expense:

My mother-in-law sees right over me. She is six feet tall and never looks down. She looks out toward the horizon instead, with an expression on her face as if she is thinking the same thought all the time, and that thought has something to do with the pioneer spirit.

Still, the way Author Oshetsky treats the poor bewildered father of this owl-baby is the reason I don't give this book five stars, why I won't be mentioning it for my annual six-stars-of-five "this book...it merged itself into me"; women get to whinge about male writers treating them as cardboard cutouts, so I have done the same.

Chouette's birth, her entry into a world not meant or designed for her, is a trauma; her mother is the only one who champions her. Naturally enough; she's got the owl-baby she expected. No one around her took her seriously when she told them, "this baby is half-owl," because who in their right mind would? Then...Chouette.

From that point on, the beautiful language...the beautiful Satanic Second Person language...goes into the full monty crazytime of a human woman raising an owl-baby, a creature she simply isn't like, but she keeps slugging. She does what mothers across the globe have always done: She learns, adapts, improvises. She makes do and she feeds, raises her child, meeting her owl-baby's needs for raw meat, for training in how to catch prey; she tussles with her owl-baby to accomplish the simplest of daily tasks.

In the teeth of a word-gale of opposition and resistance from her dog-person husband ("When it comes to our little girl, can't is a dirty word"). And I don't mean "man who likes dogs," I mean she thinks her husband...all of the rest of us not her and Chouette, in fact...are like dogs.

She does not intend a compliment in it.

The rest of the narrative is a rehash of The Yellow Wallpaper meets Gaslight. The horrors build in frequency as the reviled dog-person father succeeds in making his Charlotte into a dog-baby. Then comes the day the dog-family meets Charlotte...and she reverts to Chouette. Violently. Horribly. The dog-person father comes to a bloody end; Chouette and mother go on the lam; but, as it inevitably must, Time has her way with us:

She is strong. She is monstrously individual. She is sister to the Titans. She is Ozymandias before the fall. She is the bird of omen, dark and foul; she is blood-wed; she is Strix; she is harbinger of war and bringer of death and slughterer of armies, oh, my Polyphonte!—

She is the girl I raised her to be.

And that she is. This bizarre extended metaphorical trip through the awful, consuming process of being a mother ends as it must...in defeat, in triumph, in the hollowness of being finally ready...for the task, the life, just ended. The awful emptiness of realizing: Now it's just me I worry about, care for, be with. Now it's not You, it's just me.

All the stars I've rated this book are for that single, cruel, agonizing, slow-moving catastrophe of a realization.