1895. The Yellow Nineties. As the age of the Napoleonic and American Civil Wars closes, a new technology shrinks the world and with it, our minds. An apocalyptic sentiment takes hold, and with it, the motif of a single colour—one representing decay, salaciousness, greed, gaslight, fever, madness, and sensationalism: Yellow.

Traditional values and art, ever at odds, become cartoon inversions of themselves: One side, once conservative, grows increasingly authoritarian and revolutionary. The other, once creative and playfully disruptive, now preaches a reactionary gospel against the senses, embracing art without purpose, hedonism, debauchery, and rejecting not realism, but reality itself.

And just who is the real “King in Yellow”?

Surely, the end must be near.

The Yellowing is an annotated collection of the King in Yellow stories of Robert W. Chambers and a curated series of works that led to it, forming a contextual look at Chambers' stories and how they relate to the end of the 19th Century, themed to the color yellow. With interspersed notes and chapters explaining the interconnected ideas of the Decadent Movement, Yellow Journalism, Fin de siecle, and the origins of Abrahamic religion, The Yellowing allows the reader to see the end of the 19th Century, and thus The King in Yellow, from the point of view of a citizen of the Gilded Age. Stories include:

Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger

Edgar Allen Poe's Masque of the Red Death

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Oscar Wilde's Salome

Ambrose Bierce's Hastur and Carcosa stories

Our Sun-God by John Denham Parsons

Poetry by Omar Khayyam, William Butler Yeats, Charles Baudelaire, Bliss Carman, and Gustave Nadaud

Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley and Robert Outcault