Synopsis:
A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.
As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.
Review:
Hailey Piper can’t help herself: she’s gonna write her some cosmic horror. A weird western? Cosmic horror. A vampire novel? Just kidding. Also cosmic horror. Almost all of her work navigates that line along the thin and thinning edges of this world and what lies beyond, often plunging us through and downward, into dark places where the rules no longer apply.
And it’s always a wild ride.
In her upcoming novel, A Game in Yellow, Piper cuts to the chase and uses Robert W. Chambers The King in Yellow as its central device. Chambers’ book came out in 1895, and its loosely connected stories revolve around a cursed play that drives its readers mad. It also introduces a supernatural entity (the eponymous villain), the mysterious land of Carcosa, as well as “the yellow sign.” Over the years, all of this has been synthesized and subsumed into the cosmic horror universe and folded into the Lovecraft Mythos, and its influences can be found everywhere, from role playing games to the first season of True Detective.
Perhaps it’s needless to say, but Piper is up to something a little different here.
In A Game in Yellow, Carmen is a woman sleepwalking through her workaday life. Her only respite is at home, engaging in ever-more-complex dominant/submissive sex play with her longterm partner, Blanca. There’s a lot done here with the seemingly counter-intuitive politics of Blanca’s submissiveness and the ways it allows her complete control over her otherwise spiraling life.
Trouble is, even that isn’t quite doing it anymore. Carmen and Blanca’s “play” (and yes, this is a deliberate double entendre) is getting more and more extreme, Carmen needing more and more danger to achieve her particular pleasures. It doesn’t help that she sees this as emblematic of the relationship’s failure in general. And she might not be wrong.
When Blanca introduces her to Smoke, it’s intended to be a way to take their play to that next level, theoretically healing what’s ailing in their relationship. Smoke is a mysterious figure who has a new toy: a portion of the cursed play, The King in Yellow. Smoke portions out small passages of the play to Carmen, walking her up to the edge of madness before pulling her back.
The trouble, of course, is that what this relationship really needs is an honest conversation (and maybe some therapy), and soon Carmen is jonesing for another glimpse into Carcosa, a kind of mirror world where her own history is mixed up in Chambers’ mythology, and soon, the promised madness is near at hand.
There are certainly erotic passages in The Game in Yellow, but I’m not sure they necessarily “work” in any prurient way. Piper instead walks the razor-thin line between Eros and Thanatos, mixing BDSM with possibly world-ending cosmic calamity, and there’s absolutely no promise that things will turn out well for anyone.
All of this is so wild and wildly compelling, that it would be easy to overlook the little glimpses of these characters’ back-stories, all of them buried under layers of traumatic scar tissue, and these passages are poignantly heart-rending.
In the end, A Game in Yellow, is a strange and particularly dark ride, but Piper’s storytelling chops guide us through the darkness holding out hope of redemption even as she snatches it away.
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