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’s “A Game in Yellow,” is queer, cosmic, carnal madness that coils itself around your brainstem and talks dirty to you in an ancient language. As addictive and compulsive as the strange play it details, Piper’s latest is seductive and uncanny nightmare fuel distilled to its most potent and unholy. It is in many ways a novel full of juxtapositions and dissonance. It’s deeply intimate and yet loud and cosmic, it has scenes full of fluorescent corporate malaise, followed by the darkest reality-warping, mind-boggling horror imaginable- even its gorgeous, garish cover clashes, hot pink against bright yellow. This is a novel that invites the reader not to simply observe the horrors that unfold, but participate, and you can do just that from August 12th, when it releases from Saga Press. I’d like to extend my thanks to Lane Heymont at The Tobias Literary Agency for sending me my copy. Now, grab your mask and join the golden masquerade.
Carmen loves her girlfriend Blanca, but things in the bedroom have gone haywire. She has no libido and the pair are running out of new things to try out. There is, of course, an until. Blanca meets Smoke at a bar. Smoke is mysterious, and offers the couple far more than just a third. In her possession is a strange play, “The King in Yellow.” Should you be able to tear yourself away from its pages, you get quite the high, and it’s arguably the aphrodisiac that the couple oh so desperately need. Should you not be able to resist the gilded pull of the play though, it may begin to read you instead.
The play “The King in Yellow,” is of course, not a fictional one, written by Robert Chambers in 1895. I haven’t read it yet and I really should considering the monolithic scope of its impact. It’s been passed between writers of horror fiction for yonks, from Lovecraft, back in the day, to contemporary authors like Todd Keisling, Jonathan Maberry and indeed, the magnificent Hailey Piper. There is a rather delightful, meta intertextuality to this- a text within a text that reflects and distorts and leaves quite the mark upon those who find themselves reading it, just like it has made its mark upon cosmic horror itself.
Of course, “The King in Yellow,” is only something that Piper riffs off of. A progenitor. Chambers’ 1895 play may be influential, but this novel is a small piece of rebellion intended for contemporary audiences. Cosmic horror, which is about as macro as you can get, for me, works best when written about within the micro- this time, the relationship between two messy lesbians, and their struggles with self worth and family trauma. I am by no means a therapist (although I perhaps need one post-Piper) but it seemed to me that the breakdown within Blanca and Carmen’s relationship was not the structure or kink of it, but the repression and lack of communication. Irrespective, the cast were certainly more than just archetypes, vessels for theme, or names on a page, meaning that when Carmen begins being dragged into “The King in Yellow,” we too are teetering on the precipice of sanity and peering into the same void.
Damp with eroticism and dripping with exquisite prose, “A Game in Yellow,” is a psychosexual fever dream full of lyricism and rot, and devoid of anything readers are comfortable or familiar with. It’s strange and wonderful and scary, and queer to its very bones. It may divide readers, and would certainly cause certain, more censorious, corners of the American legislature to clutch their pearls, declare it pornographic and call for a ban, but surely, that’s all the more reason to read it. It’s deeply weird, deeply felt, deeply original, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
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