I sit there in the dark letting those last words still echo about in my head. “The truth is little man,” the words are worms crawling through my flesh. “I only laid the foundation: six, maybe ten blocks. That is all. Others, more adept than I, built the spiraling towers and the walls. But this man, this prose poet, this sculptor of text, he has turned my pile of stones into a new tower of Babylon. These are not your father’s weird tales. These are tales that will claw at your reptilian brain and keep you waiting for the sun to beat back the darkness. He has seen the rise and fall, the decadence and depravity of the age and captured the best and worst of it. The styles all flow into and through him: the beats echo in his words, and the nihilists, and the expressionists. The rough plain language of Chandler and Noir writers others have all forgotten dwell there as well. You think of him as a Weird writer of the Twentieth Century, but the truth is, he is The Weird Writer of the Twentieth Century. Others may lay claim to a style, a substance, a particular oeuvre, but when it comes to the Weird he is more than just the man, more than just a writer of Carcosan tales.”
I shudder as I remember these next words, for it was this at last that lifted the veil and set me screaming. “Some would dare to provide him with a title. Some dare to call him the Yellow King, or the Lord of Carcosa. They are fools, just as you were for thinking that he didn’t know who you were. He is not the Lord of Carcosa, he is Carcosa itself. He has always known who and what you are. He sees you for what you are, despite your insignificance.”
And then in my dream, in my nightmare, the Lake of Hali vanishes, as Carcosa closes his eye, and I pass from his view.
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., is the author of the novels, The Orphan Palace and Nightmare’s Disciple, and he has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including “Weird Fiction Review”, “Crypt of Cthulhu”, and “Lovecraft eZine”, Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings (I and III), Book of Cthulhu and Tales of Jack the Ripper, The Starry Wisdom Library, and The Children of Old Leech. His short story collections, Blood Will Have Its Season, SIN & ashes, and Portraits of Ruin, were published by Hippocampus Press.
He edited A Season in Carcosa and The Grimscribe’s Puppets (Miskatonic River Press), and Ann K. Schwader’s The Worms Remember.
He is at work on two new mixed-genre collections of weird fiction, A House of Hollow Wounds (Hippocampus Press 2015), and The Protocols of Ugliness, both edited by Jeffrey Thomas, and the upcoming anthologies, Cassilda’s Song and The Leaves of a Necronomicon (both Chaosium 2015).
You can find him online at www.thisyellowmadness.com.
The King in Yellow Tales: Volume 1 Page 27