Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
We’ve all encountered the work of Robert W. Chambers before.
Even if you haven’t read his bizarre romantic/weird fiction mosaic novel The King in Yellow, the later connections made between Chambers’ work and the Lovecraftian figure of Hastur, the repeated mention of the doomed city of Carcosa in cosmic horror, and the way references to his work pop up everywhere from True Detective to The Witcher mean that in some way, you’ve experienced his work. The most ambitious of The King in Yellow’s tales about the mysterious, madness-inducing play that gives the book its title is “The Repairer of Reputations,” the story of a megalomaniac, an insidious blackmailer, and their plans to take over a dystopian fascist United States of America. In its exploration of gothic archetypes, it lays bare the petty delusions of its power-hungry villains and questions the incorruptible pureness of its heroes; in doing Chambers shines a light on the complex relationship such stories have with power and privilege (a relationship usually taken for granted, or simply ignored).
Hildred Castaigne is a recently released mental patient, a man whose tumble from horseback left him with an “excited temperament” and a new purpose: to become king of the United States of America and usurp the fascist government. Aiding him in this task is a blackmailer and “repairer of reputations,” the disfigured Mr. Wilde, and Wilde’s army of “clients” he forces to do his bidding in various ways. From Wilde’s tiny room, they direct their conspirators in various schemes, all in service of their own power and a mysterious play titled The King in Yellow. Threatening to derail Castaigne’s plans are his love for the innocent armorer’s daughter Constance Hawberk and the fact that his dashing cousin Louis, a cavalry officer in the United States Army, has captured Constance’s heart. As the shadowy conspiracy reaches its fever pitch, Castaigne’s petty romantic rivalry threatens to derail his plans and lose him the throne.
At the start of the story, Castaigne’s got all the qualities of a Gothic antihero. He’s well-spoken and well-read, urbane, and his villainous qualities are partly the cause of a major head injury and the influence of a corrupting artifact, the eldritch play The King in Yellow. It’s also clear he’s a despicable fascist from the appreciative way he talks about the gleaming aesthetics of Chambers’ dystopian setting, highlighting in his opening narration such “flourishes” as government-sponsored suicide booths with marble columns and the expulsion of anyone who isn’t a white European. It’s the first sign of a certain wrongness in everything, that perhaps instead of the cultured, Byronic villains of gothic text there might be something far worse going on with Castaigne, and that he might not have the tragic or sympathetic qualities his narrative voice would suggest. Like last week’s Clara Militch, Castaigne has deluded himself into believing that he’s some kind of dark antihero where in reality he’s a megalomaniac who fell off his horse a little too hard.
He’s also petty and jealous, quietly terrorizing Constance’s father with knowledge gained from Mr. Wilde’s job as an information broker and bitterly fantasizing about misfortune befalling his more functional cousin/rival. His own machinations are heavily dependent on Wilde feeding his delusional megalomania, as he remains eagerly in thrall to his disfigured comrade—the only two places he ever seems to go are his own rooms and Hawberk’s building, where he can creepily make advances on Constance while also visiting Wilde on the third floor. Whenever Castaigne’s delusions are challenged, he reacts violently, expanding the scope of his plan, which eventually extends to murdering his psychiatrist, Mr. Hawberk, and Constance for presumably mocking him. The further the story gets, the more his delusions are laid bare, much like his cherished Yellow Crown being revealed as a brass-and-tinsel costume piece.
This pettiness and bottomless desire for power also extends to Wilde, who is seen in most scenes abusing his cat and gleefully namedropping the number of powerful people he controls from the tiny upstairs room he never leaves. Wilde is a grotesque, a disfigured man who wields soft power openly in this fascist state (though in a grim moment of humor it’s implied that the cat he mistreats might be responsible for his disfigurement rather than any tragic accident, as it brutally attacks him whenever it sees an opening). He’s a study in contrasts—a man who appears to wield immense power and influence, though confined to an office, and the only demonstration we see of his power is when he reads names and figures from books, in one scene hypnotizing one of his more unstable lackeys through merely reading a scroll about the secret lineage of the United States (which in Chambers’ bizarre future is apparently a monarchy, or used to be).
It’s this hypnosis scene that shows Wilde as he is. Far from the mysterious power broker pulling all the strings from his tiny room, he’s a self-aggrandizing manipulator, preying upon the paranoid and mentally unwell. In the end, he doesn’t even live to see his plans collapse around him, as the realistic outcomes of abusing a feral animal to the point of homicidal rage and relying on psychologically disturbed people to carry out his conspiratorial aims mean his cat appears to have mauled him to death in his sleep and his hired killer fails to kill anyone before diving headlong into a suicide booth, shrieking madly. The story ends (relatively) happily, with the bewildered Louis set to marry Constance and Castaigne dying a day later in a psychiatric facility.
Even in this apparently happy ending, there’s still a wrongness to everything. While the heroes have won, Louis remains a military officer serving a dystopian regime who did nothing to stop the villains whatsoever. He’s the very image of a dashing hero, but both his passivity in the plot and the undeniable fact that he’s a fascist officer create an unnerving dissonance. Louis might be cast in the heroic role, but his passivity and active support of dystopian powers mean he’s no hero. If anything, he’s rewarded merely for not being the worst person in the story and thus not causing his own downfall. Despite appearances, he’s just as wrong as everyone else in the story; he just seems nicer.
This is the genius of “The Repairer of Reputations.” By setting the entire story in a fascist dystopian version of the United States, Chambers puts the reader on their guard with an all-encompassing wrongness, forcing them to question exactly how much else is wrong even as he plays many of the usual gothic tropes straight. Within this framework, he’s able to show his villains as pathetic and despicable victims of their own delusions of power, his hero as a passive figure who vigorously supports the power and privilege around him, and ultimately the grand conflict of conspiracy and ambition as a petty struggle that leaves the oppressive dystopian regime with barely a scratch. By blending elements of science fiction and gothic horror, Chambers crafts a twisted gothic satire that remains heightened and fantastic even as it highlights the grim pettiness of its protagonist’s grand ambitions.
Now to turn it over to you. Do you think the dystopian futuristic setting was an inspired choice, or just an odd stylistic touch? How much of the story is Castaigne’s delusions? Which is your favorite of Chambers’ King in Yellow stories?
And please join us in two weeks for a look at a ghost story writer’s ghost story writer as we delve into Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One.”