Dreams of Carcosa

This chapter employs Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analytical frame of reparative reading to embrace the utopian possibility within Robert Chambers’ collection of short stories The King in Yellow (1895). It is a reading of the quartet as part of the weird horror genre and explores the way queer time emerges for the characters as they interact with and perform the fake play: The King in Yellow . Drawing on the scholarship of Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Jack Pryor to identify the aspect of queer time within the works, the chapter focuses on reading the madness of the fake text reparatively. The chapter emphasizes how the performance of Chambers’ pseudobiblia has the power to alter reality, allowing the characters to invent histories and speculate about their futures. Using the scholarship of Roberth Luckhurst and Bethany Doane, it imagines the fake playscript as an object that the story’s characters interact with, and offers how such pseudobiblia might confer plentitude, not simply inchoate madness, to both the characters and the readers.