Horror and ambiguity: chasing fear in Chamber’s fiction

R. W. Chambers’ “In the Court of the Dragon” is a fever dream of paranoia and creeping horror.

As with all of the stories in this collection, the influence of “The King in Yellow” – a forbidden and cursed play that drives anyone who reads it to insanity – looms large, hinting at horrors just beyond comprehension.

The story follows an unnamed narrator who, while attending a church service in Paris, becomes fixated on the organist. There’s something wrong – something unnatural – about the man at the keys. As the narrator notices this, the organist looks at him from across the church – a look of sheer, intense hatred.

The organist disappears, leaving the narrator trying to convince himself that he had imagined it. Yet something kept tugging at the corner of his mind – things simply seemed off. He felt a bizarre urge to mock those around him, to laugh in the face of godliness. Deeply disturbed,the narrator stands up mid-sermon and sprints out of the church.

As the narrator flees into the bright morning, the world around him warps into something terrifyingly unreal.

As he walks home, the narrator notices the organist again.This time, the organist passes by without the narrator seeing him – his passage is noticed only by the sheer malignity surrounding him.

Later, closer to home, the organist appears again, coming so close as to bump into the narrator.

Is he being hunted by some embodied malevolent force, or is the madness of “The King in Yellow”setting in?

Just as he reaches his door, the narrator turns around.

A dozen paces behind him is the organist.

He’s walking at a steady pace directly towards the narrator, staring him down. Willing him to cease his existence: darkness flooded the narrator’s vision.

Then, he’s startled awake by the scraping of feet among church pews as the congregation rose to their feet.He had slept through the sermon. Wait.

Had he slept through the sermon? The narrator looks up at the organ in the gallery – there’s the hateful organist. The narrator had escaped–but what did he escape?

A realization dawns on the narrator. He knew this being. He had known since he first laid eyes on him. The King in Yellow.

Dazzling light filled the narrator’s eyes, and it kept increasing. Brighter and brighter, hotter and hotter, waves of fire washing over him.

As the narrator sank, the last thing he heard was a whisper: “it is a fearful thing to fall…”.

Cut. End of scene. Roll credits.

What happened? Why? How? Even the “Who?” in this story is questionable, as there’s clearly something going on with our unreliable narrator.

Was he actually being hunted by the King in Yellow?

Had he fallen into madness during the church service? These are never explained, nor should they be. The strangeness and horror of Chambers’ stories stem from this ambiguity, this uncertainty.

We fear what we cannot control, and we cannot control what we do not understand.

This is the lesson of horror, and it is all too applicable to worlds outside the fictional.