Someone has recently recommended I should watch the first season of True Detective, and imagine my surprise when the characters started invoking Carcosa. As a roleplayer, the name is known to me from the Supplement 5 of Original Dungeons & Dragons, or its namesake from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess line – both describing a mysterious world of Carcosa, where men are sacrificed during the chanting of cruel rituals and mysterious radiations twist those inhabitants reckless or unlucky enough to enter the areas, where mind-powers are hurled against foes and innocent victims, and where space-aliens battle with evil gods.
Loosely inspired are these roleplaying-materials by the writings of Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers, which were widely read and at some point referenced by many later authors, including HP Lovecraft, Robert Anton Wilson and Marion Zimmer Bradley, and inspired many more.

I was waiting for the connection to the literature being drawn in the TV show, but that did not happen – even though the tone of the show honored the tradition of a creeping horror too vast to fully grasp in the moment, but crushing once its implications are understood.

In the end I decided to re-read the Carcosa stories of Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers, collected in a book called “The King in Yellow”; there is also the original works by Chambers, also titled “The King in Yellow”; in addition, the short stories penned by both authors are available either standalone or together with other works .. it hardly matters, as the stories do not directly connect apart from a small cameo mention here and there.

What unites them are mentions of “The King in Yellow”, a book or theater play that features in many stories, but is not re-told directly, we only see the tremendous impact the story has on characters who read it, “The Yellow Sign”, and the name of “Carcosa”, which can be a city or a planet, or maybe an alternate reality. In any case, the effect of the Yellow King and the Yellow Sign is typically negative, and the influence of Carcosa overwhelming: it is easy to see how these stories by Bierce and Chambers have inspired Lovecraft’s cosmic horror themes: influences too subtle or too strange to analyze or completely understand, but at the same time too strong to deny. In the end, HP Lovecraft invented his own oft-referenced book that features in many of his stories independently (the Necronomicon), which also is not re-told in any story, merely seen or read by characters to their detriment. The parallels to “The King in Yellow” are obvious.

Ambrose Bierce wrote the first Carcosa story in 1886; he invented the raw idea. Robert W. Chambers picked it up almost immediately to use it in his work of 1895; he expanded on the cosmos and grounded it on Earth. The unsettling stories seem familiar to us today, we know the style from HP Lovecraft and those who emulated him, and from Cthulhu-derivates. It is useful to remember that these stories, as much as they feel like treading well-known ground as they dabble in the “classic” cosmic horror, are the source material: they are the original from whence all others sprang.

As such, they are surprisingly smooth and stand the test of time like an A. The pacing compares well to more modern fiction, and the dramaturgy holds up fine too, with pretty gripping crescendos: despite appearances, readers in 1900 were not that different from readers in 2020+ after all.