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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, horror
dates read: 21.11.25-22.11.25
Sam Flynn’s The Mystery of the Pale King is a secondary-world cosmic horror story drawing straightforwardly on Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow. I had high hopes but, alas, it disappointed me.
the novel follows Faron, a thirteen-year-old page in service to Bishop Antonius (who prefers to go by just “Bishop”) of the Sol Church in the kingdom of Yorgos. Bishop is assigned to travel south to the border province of Hathur to repossess it from its lord, the so-called “Hero of Hathur”, who has given himself over to “pagan” rites in honor of the Pale King, an entity he honors with regular performances of the titular play. Bishop and Faron’s journey to Hathur does not go well, and when they arrive they find betrayal at every turn. Faron is left alone, trying desperately to rescue his lord, in a land that is both hostile and unsettlingly familiar, because it’s where he was born.
the writing is mostly fine, though it seems like the turn-of-the-century weird fiction register that Flynn is reaching for is slightly outside his grasp — there keep being moments like “My mother was from Hathur. Antonia, after whom my name honors.” more generally, there’s what feels like a certain lack of confidence to the novel, evident both from its style — reaching for Chambers and Lovecraft — and its content — the borrowing from Chambers, the fact that the “Grand Arcanist” of the Pale King is named “Aleister”, the ghost ship arriving in the harbor filled with signs of death and a tale of horror conveyed by its captain (here present as the sole survivor). there’s good stuff here, but by staying in familiar (indeed, overly familiar) territory, a mix-and-match of borrowings from 1890s-1930s, the novel ends up feeling safe rather than weird.
there are some not unfamiliar but not quite so obvious in cosmic horror elements, but even these — for example, a literally-underground community of survivors of the “Zarak”, the Yorgosi term for the original inhabitants of Hathur, pushed into hiding by Yorgosi conquest, who worship an omnipresent Divine Mother — are pretty tired. oh, you’re saying there are secret pantheistic Goddess-Worshippers who have been persecuted by the cruel and patriarchal off-brand Christians? how shocking. I have never heard of this before. (I say this sarcastically not to deny the violent history of Christian suppression of “pagan” or “heathen” religions in the course of colonialism and imperialism but rather to point out that this is, at the end of the day, just Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis crossed with Gerald Gardner’s elaboration of a backstory for Wicca.)
thematically, there could have been something interesting here: a story about how empires — or rather perhaps how capitalism — self-cannibalize(s) when they reach the limits of their ability to expand. unable to extract imperial spoils from conquest or exploitation, Yorgos is consumed by famine and unrest, sacrificing its own children on the altar of power since it can no longer steal children from the people it conquers. but instead of letting the Pale King be a manifestation of this, a Zarak woman informs Faron that the Pale King is a known supernatural entity that lives in the mountains and has been manipulating the Hero. evil comes from outside after all, even if imperial violence let it in — the classic cosmic horror move. also of course the signs of the Hero’s moral decay are that he’s now fat and balding and wearing stage makeup.
also, parchment check: “Then the Hero’s eldest son tore the parchment over and over before scattering the pieces at Bishop’s feet.” whoops.
moods: dark, grimy, tense