THIS IS MATERIAL FROM THE ICE CAVE. IT HAS NOT YET BEEN FORMATTED.
From: "Andy Robertson"
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 00 12:55PM PDT
Are we going to see "The Black Priest" and "The Purple Emperor"?
Both these are titles of stories by Chambers, though the stories don't seem, at least superficially, to have KiY relevance. I have them somewhere in this chaos of breeding books I call a house.
The Glove Cleaner
"It was from rumours of this book, the Necronomicon (of which relatively few of the general public know) that R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel "The King in Yellow" (1895)."
- History of Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft
From: Super Dave
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2000 8:40 PM
I've heard of the stories and know NOTHING about them, unfortunately. All the Chambers I have available to me currently are the stuff I've found on the net and Chaosium's first fiction collection, *The Hastur Cycle.* I am desperately awaiting the Wizard's Attic reissue of the complete *King in Yellow* stories, which I have on order.
Can you give us any details about these guys to tantalize us, O-Gurabu-Kuriinaa-sama?
Dave
From: "Andy Robertson"
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 00 00:38AM PDT
They are in "The Mystery Of Choice", a collection.
I don't know if I should tell you anything about them. Arty types like you should be tantalised and stimulated, not sated.
The truth is I found the titles highly evocative, and the stories, when I read them, were a bit of a let-down.
But maybe in your alternate world the Vibe possessed Chambers more completely, and the true stories emerge, with their reflection in reality.
From
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/5582/chambers.html#booklist
The Mystery of Choice, 1897, has been regarded by some to be even better than The King in Yellow. The first five stories are linked by the geographical location of the tales, Brittany, and also some characters who appear in some of them. This is the last book he wrote in which he used a "Gallic studio atmosphere", as Lovecraft put it, apparently because that kind of setting was no longer popular. The first tale, The Purple Emperor, is a horror story with detective elements, and the rest of the collection consists of mostly horror stories along with some that contain traces of science-fiction. Fantastic stories in this volume include The Purple Emperor, Pompe Funèbre, The Messenger, The White Shadow, Passeur, and The Key of Grief. Other stories are A Matter of Interest, the latter in fact being a set of stories stitched together into a continuous narrative, concerning the discovery of the last living dinosaur, the thermosaurus.
The three tales The Purple Emperor, Pompe Funèbre and The Messenger are also connected, this time by the narrator, Dick Darrel, and his French love, Lys. In The Purple Emperor we meet a nasty butterfly collector who is nicknamed The Purple Emperor after having found a very rare butterfly going by the same name. His rival, The Red Admiral, discovers a way to summon the butterfly which gave The Purple Emperor his name and small measure of fame. The Emperor does, of course, not approve of this, and murders his rival. The narrator, Dick Darrel, in passing mentions the Black Priest, although we gain no clue as to who or what this is. The story ends with Dick's leaving town with his newfound love, Lys, who is the daughter of The Purple Emperor. In the next story, Pompe Funèbre, the two reappear, and encounter a very large beetle. In the final story, The Messenger, we meet the two lovers again, and now the Black Priest is revealed for who he is: a priest who lived and died in the seventeenth century. He betrayed the French fort where he lived to the English, and then he betrayed the English soldiers sent to capture the fort. The thirty-eight English soldiers were buried in a mass grave, along with the Black Priest. He cast a curse upon the ancestors of Lys, and said that when his skull, the thirty-ninth, was uncovered, he would rise from the grave and have his revenge. And that he does.
Some of the stories are online at http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/englishl/chambers/mysteryo/contents. htm
(damn. "The Black Priest" is a linking character, not a story title. And did I read them online anyway? Maybe that's why I can't find the book? Curse this internet thingy)
The Glove Cleaner
From: "Greg Muir"
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 00 18:27PM PDT
I've heard of the stories and know NOTHING about them, unfortunately. All
the Chambers I have available to me currently are the stuff I've found on
the net and Chaosium's first fiction collection, *The Hastur Cycle.* I am
desperately awaiting the Wizard's Attic reissue of the complete *King in
Yellow* stories, which I have on order.
http://www.litrix.com/kyellow/kyell001.htm
While you're waiting you can have fun with this version. Hella cool. :)
Greg Muir
From: "Greg Muir"
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 00 18:16PM PDT
Are we going to see "The Black Priest" and "The Purple Emperor"?
Question: where did the Queen in Red come from? There's a Blue Oyster Cult song ETI that features a line that says "the king in yellow and the queen in red." I always assumed it was a coinkidink and didn't pay it any more mind. Perhaps I should?
And speaking of weird KiY influences, check out the new Alice in Wonderland game. This is like Disney mets David Lynch.
http://www.alice.ea.com/main.html
Greg Muir
From: "Andy Robertson"
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 00 01:58AM PDT
- Original Message -
From: Greg Muir
Question: where did the Queen in Red come from? There's a Blue Oyster Cult
song ETI that features a line that says "the king in yellow and the queen in
red."
The immediate source is John Tyne's KIY related story "Sosostris". Two of Tynes' KiY stories are available online
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/lion/157/ambrose.htm
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/lion/157/broad1.htm
Though they don't directly mention the Queen.
I always assumed it was a coinkidink
Nothing is a coincidence
The Glove Cleaner
From: "Super Dave"
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 00 03:59AM PDT
From: "Andy Robertson"
song ETI that features a line that says "the king in yellow and the queen in red."
Well, we did have an earlier on-list story by Lech (Hey, Lech—where are you, man!?) called "The Queen in Red," a multipart, action-filled romp that was fun as hell. He started a sequel and then disappeared. Hmmm…perhaps this is a dangerous thing to look into.
http://www.delta-green.com/opint/case_histories/ch_ADG.DS-0099.html
Anyway, I'm not sure where Lech got it from—maybe the Blue Oyster Cult song (and that was one of those mysterious lines that haunted my headbanging youth).
A quick skim of the Blue Oyster Cult FAQ
http://www.j-and-a.com/blueoystercult/faq.html
did not reveal any explanation of the line Greg quoted. I've always assumed it had something to do with alchemy, because another BOC song refers to "The Red and the Black," which is definitely alchemical, and that *Imaginos* album went WAY into alchemy, Bacon, and HPL.
http://webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/color/reds3.php
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Cockpit/4786/anglais/alchemy/red.htm
Then there's the "Red Queen Principle" to consider:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REDQUEEN.html
And something that might be of interest that I just happened across while searching obsessively for the answer:
http://www.agon.com/ergo/avatarism.html
But in the end, we should just ask Rev himself: Yo, Tynes—care to drop us a hint on where you picked up that memetic Queen in Red virus? We don't expect a direct answer…something cryptic will suffice.
Indeed. Funny that I'd just finished rereading a 300-yen copy of *Through the Looking Glass* I'd picked up on a lark when this question cropped up…
"Well in *our* country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, *here*, you see, it takes all the running *you* can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Looked at a little sideways (and when dealing with Hastur, you've got to look at everything sideways), doesn't that sound rather like Carcosa?
Dave
(Some of these URLs were already mentioned onlist before, but I repeated them here for the sake of completeness.)
From: Robert McLaughlin
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 00 04:40AM PDT
I also always wondered at the origins of that line in Blue Oyster Cult's ETI.
"Imaginos" is an incredibly cool album… and highly recommended for it's haunting tale that seems to hint just too much at the eldritch horrors of the Mythos.
One of the two game scripts I wrote for Cthulhu Live Second Edition, "The Magna of Illusion", is directly based on the Imaginos album… filling in some of the mysteries and extending the storyline spun through the album to the climax after World War I that Imaginos falls just shy of describing. The script details the long and sinister life of Captain DelRio (with a particularly evil journal I might add) and reveals the true horrors of the Magna of Illusion, that black mirror which slept within the Temple of Jade and was stolen from the jungle by fire and blood to rest in the attic in Cornwall… preparing itself and growing fat on the suffering of Europe. As you can probably tell… I like that album. :-) And certainly must recommend "The Magna of Illusion" in CL 2d Edition to any BOC fans on the list.
Robert "Mac" McLaughlin
Cthulhu Live
http://www.cthulhulive.com
From: "James Holloway"
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 00 07:46AM PDT
Another source to consider:
in Pagan's 1991 chapbook "Stark Raving MAD," Kevin Ross wrote a short article detailing an entity/tome known as the Queen in Red. He related it to Liszt's Totentanz and the piece of art (Orcagna's "Trimuph of Death?" memory fails me…) which inspired it.
Ross was drawing on the Blue Oyster Cult reference in this article.
James Holloway