This isn't Simon Bucher-Jones's first release of this book. He's been working on the project for years and this is its third edition. I reviewed an earlier one in 2015 and even before that had seen another draft... but that's over ten years ago, which was enough time for me to come to this reasonably fresh.

Here's the old review (which I avoided rereading when writing this).

My favourite thing about this book was actually the non-fiction discussion of Robert Chambers's original work and other writers' explorations of its ideas. That context made a huge difference for me. It shed light on what I'd just read and heightened my appreciation of Bucher-Jones's attempt to do the impossible, building on the clues and evidence from those other stories. I love that kind of thing.

In-fiction, The King in Yellow is a stage play that drives you mad. Watching a performance or even reading the script will destroy your mind. This is a spooky idea that's influenced many horror or horror-ish writers over the years. Bucher-Jones gives a selected bibliography, while googling gave me other recent examples including Joe Koch's Wingspan of Severed Hands (2020), a graphic novel called Where Black Stars Rise (2022), what appears to be a five-book series by Joseph Sale called Lost Carcosa (2023-24) and even the first season of HBO's TV series, True Detective.

This book is different from those, though. Instead of being about the effects of The King in Yellow, it's the actual stage play itself. This is an unachievable goal... and if you'd succeeded, you wouldn't dare publish it.

It's pretty damn weird. It's a 197-page comic strip, with two fixed panels a page. The art's by Bucher-Jones himself, who isn't a comics artist but even so has created something that appears to combine photoshopping, naive art, multiple styles (often in the same panel) and some genuinely nifty visual ideas. Sometimes, characters wear masks that turn them into each other. This is a strange visual idea that wouldn't work as simply and naturally in any other medium, especially with surreal art like this. Conversely, "I wear no mask" has genuine impact, given the character design Bucher-Jones has created for him.

There's a character who resembles both The Prisoner and Frankenstein's hunchback assistant Igor. There are detailed, realistic characters (who are the same in every panel), while others are rendered in simple hand-drawn lines. Furthermore, the art's aware that it's a representation of a stage play. It has a fixed viewpoint, characters who deliver their lines facing forward towards the audience and even stage curtains that close between scenes to allow set changes. This creates a strange effect that you won't see in other comics, especially given the substantial page count and the book's large, full-colour format.

Then there's the dialogue. It's in Shakespearean verse, to the extent of casting Alfred Jarry's Ubu as a Shakespearean fool with a different voice, like the Porter in Macbeth. All that I loved. I've used iambic pentameter in my own writing, so a full-length modern work like this? Absolutely, bring it on. Crucially, Bucher-Jones writes it well.

As a narrative, though, it's odd. (That's a feature, not a bug.) It ends so abruptly that you'll be wondering if it's incomplete. Might there be other scenes that weren't "recovered"? Its effect is strange and surreal, but not necessarily outright horror (despite some effective horror moments). Its rhythm and narrative progression are Shakespearean, which again means it occupies a head space unlike anything else. (Even Shakespeare himself didn't write nearly-Lovecraftian novel-length comics.)

It's a pretty amazing experiment. It gave me the urge to go looking for other King in Yellow stories, for comparison. Bucher-Jones's bibliography cites Robert W. Chambers (of course), James Blish, Thom Ryng, a Joseph S. Pulver anthology and a Call of Cthulhu campaign.

Overall, this isn't a book for general readers. I'm the only person in my family who'd get it. It is, though, intriguing and unlike anything else you'll read.