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.

A HUNDRED YEARS AND A DAY: 34 Stories defies all the Japanese-fiction expectations by embracing the form

A HUNDRED YEARS AND A DAY: 34 Stories
TOMOKA SHIBASAKI (tr. Polly Barton)
MONKEY/Stone Bridge Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.95 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This ground-breaking collection from Tomoka Shibasaki, author of the acclaimed novel Spring Garden, pushes the short story to a new level.

In these stories of human connection in a contemporary, alienated world, people come together to share pieces of their lives, then part. We meet the women who share a house after the outbreak of war before going their separate ways once it is over; the man who lives in a succession of rooftop apartments; the diverging lives of two brothers who are raised as latch-key kids by factory workers; the old ramen restaurant that endures despite the demolition of all surrounding buildings; people who watch a new type of spaceship lift off from a pier that once belonged to an island resort; and more.

These 34 tales from all over the planet have the compulsive power of news reports, narrated in a crisp yet allegorical style.

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

My Review: There is a pattern I follow when reviewing short stories: I call it, for convenience, The Bryce Method after my old friend Bryce and his collection-spanning short summary followed by a very short summary and rating of the individual story habits from his blogging days.

Not going to work here.

Thirty-four stories in two hundred pages is problem one; not much between summary and spoiler. Two is these are stories that begin with something I'd call a spoiler: a summary-like paragraph set off from the text, which honestly took a half-star off my overall rating for off-puttingness. I think it's pointless, for these reasons, to use my old method as it would really add to the wall-to-wall spoilers. To avoid a close encounter with the shrieking Spoiler Stasi maniacs, allow me to review the gestalt of the collection for you.

It was fine. Nice prose, I'd say based on a long reading life with more than the usual number of translated works in many genres, quite gracefully translated. Plenty of well-woven-in clues to words that wouldn't translate. A solid, creditable job for a nice book of stories.

Does anything here do something that "pushes the short story to a new level"? No.

Does it really need to? No. Breathless copy does nothing good for this solid, well-crafted collection of short fiction mostly exploring the horrors of trying to communicate with actual other human beings in mutually satisfying connective ways. It's a collection full of fun, if weird, ways for that to fail. It has no central character or group, unlike that Ryu Murakami book I wasn't keen on that did mostly the same thing. It isn't set in one place like Pleasantville, that braided-stories novel I liked so well. In the off-kilter liminal spaces we're in for the whole collection, I'm most put in mind of the way Brian Evenson, in his uneasy style, makes the world feel. These are *not* horror, or even horror-adjacent, stories; instead, they partake of the weirdness and not-quite-ness of horror without any of the sillier trappings.

Polly Barton's ear for, say, how a wisteria vine relates to the wisteria vine it's been entwined with for goddesses only know how long, is the main vehicle for little minds like thee and me to get access to the core of longing and need in each of these very Japanese tales. Will we really know what's what? Not in my experience, and all the more fun to read because of it.

When I finished this read I had to sit a minute and look into my emotional reactor core to see what this bolus of new fuel was doing. I'm impressed that the way Author Shibasaki and her able translator, Polly Barton, never once threw a sucker punch. These stories deliver their intensely meant, unshielded radioactivity to you direct. It's not fussy; it's not overwrought; it's the high-quality story-ore, direct to your well-shielded reactor core to be processed.

I gave it a half-star less than perfect because, in some cases, the oddball opening paragraphs say too much even for me. That's hard to do!

YEAR'S BEST WEIRD FICTION volume 5

YEAR'S BEST WEIRD FICTION, volume 5
ROBERT SHEARMAN (ed.)
Undertow Publications (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2019 British Fantasy Award!

Welcome to the final volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction! For the past five years the Year’s Best Weird Fiction has unearthed a number of exceptional and inimitable voices, redefining and broadening genre distinctions and labels, bringing a diverse new group to the forefront of speculative fiction. We hope you enjoy our final volume.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LIBRARYTHING EARLY REVIEWERS. THANK YOU.
My Review:It doesn't seem logical that this is the final volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction. A series that's garnered nothig but favorable fannish attenton seems as though five years and the "unearth{ing of} a number of exceptional and inimitable voices, seems to me to be one of those bullet-proof, recession-resistant sales cornerstones that publishers dream of. Enter, stage left, the villain of every recent piece of bad news: the pandemic of 2020 to 2022. All the usual formulae got upended; all the supply chains that we took for granted showed us how bad an idea that is by collapsing.

Thank goodness a lot of people we never so much as give a moment's though to worked very, very hard, and at risk of their lives, or we'd've seen a complete collapse à la the Bronze Age Collapse of 3,200 years ago that resulted in hundreds of years of grim, grinding poverty for a collapsed population of warring bands and tribes. (Of course, we still might.)

For the first time in 2023, we return to the blog's very venerable institution of using the Bryce Method of discussing collections (and/or anthologies) of short fiction story-by-story.


As an award-winning anthology, I'd feel hubristic rating this anthology less than four-plus stars; who am I to second guess such a distinguished body of experts?

“Live Through This” by Nadia Bulkin



“Flotsam” by Daniel Carpenter



“The Narrow Escape of Zipper-Girl” by Adam-Troy Castro



“The Unwish” by Claire Dean



“Worship Only What She Bleeds” by Kristi DeMeester



“The Second Door” by Brian Evenson



“When Words Change the Molecular Composition of Water” by Jenni Fagan



“The Convexity of Our Youth” by Kurt Fawver



“Corzo” by Brenna Gomez



“The Mouse Queen” by Camilla Grudova



“You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych” by Kathleen Kayembe



“The Anteater” by Joshua King



“Curb Day” by Rebecca Kuder



“The Entertainment Arrives” by Alison Littlewood



“The Rock Eater” by Ben Loory



“Eight Bites” by Carmen Maria Machado



“The Way She is With Strangers” by Helen Marshall



“The Possession” by Michael Mirolla



“Skins Smooth as Plantain, Hearts Soft as Mango” by Ian Muneshwar



“House of Abjection” by David Peak



“Disappearer” by KL Pereira



“Red Hood” by Eric Schaller



“Something About Birds” by Paul Tremblay



“Take the Way Home That Leads Back To Sullivan Street” by Chavisa Woods