The Queen In Red
The Purple Emporer & The Black
Priest
The King in Yellow Online
Who is this Queen in Red?
The Blue Oyster Cult & The Red Queen Principle
The Blue Oyster Cult- Imaganos
Liszt's Totentanz
From: "Andy Robertson"
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 00 12:55PM PDT
Are we going to see "The Black Priest" and "The Purple Emperor"?
Both these are titles of stories by Chambers, though the stories don't
seem,
at least superficially, to have KiY relevance. I have them somewhere in
this chaos of breeding books I call a house.
The Glove Cleaner
"It was from rumours of this book, the Necronomicon (of which relatively
few
of the general public know) that R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the
idea of his early novel "The King in Yellow" (1895)."
- History of Necronomicon by H.P. Lovecraft
From: Super Dave
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2000 8:40 PM
I've heard of the stories and know NOTHING about them, unfortunately.
All
the Chambers I have available to me currently are the stuff I've found on
the net and Chaosium's first fiction collection, *The Hastur Cycle.* I am
desperately awaiting the Wizard's Attic reissue of the complete *King in
Yellow* stories, which I have on order.
Can you give us any details about these guys to tantalize us,
O-Gurabu-Kuriinaa-sama?
Dave
From: "Andy Robertson"
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 00 00:38AM PDT
They are in "The Mystery Of Choice", a collection.
I don't know if I should tell you anything about them. Arty types like
you
should be tantalised and stimulated, not sated.
The truth is I found the titles highly evocative, and the stories, when
I
read them, were a bit of a let-down.
But maybe in your alternate world the Vibe possessed Chambers more
completely, and the true stories emerge, with their reflection in reality.
From
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/5582/chambers.html#booklist
The Mystery of Choice, 1897, has been regarded by some to be even better
than The King in Yellow. The first five stories are linked by the
geographical location of the tales, Brittany, and also some characters who
appear in some of them. This is the last book he wrote in which he used a
"Gallic studio atmosphere", as Lovecraft put it, apparently because that
kind of setting was no longer popular. The first tale, The Purple Emperor,
is a horror story with detective elements, and the rest of the collection
consists of mostly horror stories along with some that contain traces of
science-fiction. Fantastic stories in this volume include The Purple
Emperor, Pompe Funèbre, The Messenger, The White Shadow, Passeur,
and The
Key of Grief. Other stories are A Matter of Interest, the latter in fact
being a set of stories stitched together into a continuous narrative,
concerning the discovery of the last living dinosaur, the thermosaurus.
The three tales The Purple Emperor, Pompe Funèbre and The Messenger
are also
connected, this time by the narrator, Dick Darrel, and his French love, Lys.
In The Purple Emperor we meet a nasty butterfly collector who is nicknamed
The Purple Emperor after having found a very rare butterfly going by the
same name. His rival, The Red Admiral, discovers a way to summon the
butterfly which gave The Purple Emperor his name and small measure of fame.
The Emperor does, of course, not approve of this, and murders his rival.
The
narrator, Dick Darrel, in passing mentions the Black Priest, although we
gain no clue as to who or what this is. The story ends with Dick's leaving
town with his newfound love, Lys, who is the daughter of The Purple Emperor.
In the next story, Pompe Funèbre, the two reappear, and encounter
a very
large beetle. In the final story, The Messenger, we meet the two lovers
again, and now the Black Priest is revealed for who he is: a priest who
lived and died in the seventeenth century. He betrayed the French fort where
he lived to the English, and then he betrayed the English soldiers sent to
capture the fort. The thirty-eight English soldiers were buried in a mass
grave, along with the Black Priest. He cast a curse upon the ancestors of
Lys, and said that when his skull, the thirty-ninth, was uncovered, he would
rise from the grave and have his revenge. And that he does.
Some of the stories are online at
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/englishl/chambers/mysteryo/contents.
htm
(damn. "The Black Priest" is a linking character, not a story title. And
did I read them online anyway? Maybe that's why I can't find the book?
Curse this internet thingy)
The Glove Cleaner
From: "Greg Muir"
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 00 18:27PM PDT
>
> I've heard of the stories and know NOTHING about them, unfortunately.
All
> the Chambers I have available to me currently are the stuff I've
found on
> the net and Chaosium's first fiction collection, *The Hastur Cycle.*
I am
> desperately awaiting the Wizard's Attic reissue of the complete
*King in
> Yellow* stories, which I have on order.
http://www.litrix.com/kyellow/kyell001.htm
While you're waiting you can have fun with this version. Hella cool. :)
Greg Muir
From: "Greg Muir"
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 00 18:16PM PDT
>
>
> Are we going to see "The Black Priest" and "The Purple Emperor"?
>
>
Question: where did the Queen in Red come from? There's a Blue Oyster
Cult
song ETI that features a line that says "the king in yellow and the queen
in
red." I always assumed it was a coinkidink and didn't pay it any more mind.
Perhaps I should?
And speaking of weird KiY influences, check out the new Alice in Wonderland
game. This is like Disney mets David Lynch.
http://www.alice.ea.com/main.html
Greg Muir
From: "Andy Robertson"
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 00 01:58AM PDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Greg Muir
>
> Question: where did the Queen in Red come from? There's a Blue Oyster
Cult
> song ETI that features a line that says "the king in yellow and
the queen
in
> red."
The immediate source is John Tyne's KIY related story "Sosostris". Two
of
Tynes' KiY stories are available online
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/lion/157/ambrose.htm
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/lion/157/broad1.htm
Though they don't directly mention the Queen.
> I always assumed it was a coinkidink
Nothing is a coincidence
The Glove Cleaner
From: "Super Dave"
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 00 03:59AM PDT
From: "Andy Robertson"
>From: Greg Muir
>>Question: where did the Queen in Red come from? There's a Blue
Oyster
Cult
>> song ETI that features a line that says "the king in yellow
and the
queen in
red."
>
>The immediate source is John Tyne's KIY related story "Sosostris".[snip]
Well, we did have an earlier on-list story by Lech (Hey, Lech--where are
you, man!?) called "The Queen in Red," a multipart, action-filled romp that
was fun as hell. He started a sequel and then disappeared. Hmmm...perhaps
this is a dangerous thing to look into.
http://www.delta-green.com/opint/case_histories/ch_ADG.DS-0099.html
Anyway, I'm not sure where Lech got it from--maybe the Blue Oyster Cult
song
(and that was one of those mysterious lines that haunted my headbanging
youth).
A quick skim of the Blue Oyster Cult FAQ
http://www.j-and-a.com/blueoystercult/faq.html
did not reveal any explanation of the line Greg quoted. I've always assumed
it had something to do with alchemy, because another BOC song refers to "The
Red and the Black," which is definitely alchemical, and that *Imaginos*
album went WAY into alchemy, Bacon, and HPL.
http://webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/color/reds3.php
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Cockpit/4786/anglais/alchemy/red.htm
Then there's the "Red Queen Principle" to consider:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REDQUEEN.html
And something that might be of interest that I just happened across while
searching obsessively for the answer:
http://www.agon.com/ergo/avatarism.html
But in the end, we should just ask Rev himself: Yo, Tynes--care to drop
us a
hint on where you picked up that memetic Queen in Red virus? We don't expect
a direct answer...something cryptic will suffice.
>Nothing is a coincidence
Indeed. Funny that I'd just finished rereading a 300-yen copy of *Through
the Looking Glass* I'd picked up on a lark when this question cropped up...
"Well in *our* country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd
generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as
we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, *here*, you see, it takes
all the running *you* can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get
somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Looked at a little sideways (and when dealing with Hastur, you've got
to
look at everything sideways), doesn't that sound rather like Carcosa?
Dave
(Some of these URLs were already mentioned onlist before, but I repeated
them here for the sake of completeness.)
From: Robert McLaughlin
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 00 04:40AM PDT
>did not reveal any explanation of the line Greg quoted. I've always
assumed
it had something to do with alchemy, because another BOC song refers to
"The
Red and the Black," which is definitely alchemical, and that *Imaginos*
album went WAY into alchemy, Bacon, and HPL.
I also always wondered at the origins of that line in Blue Oyster Cult's
ETI.
"Imaginos" is an incredibly cool album... and highly recommended for it's
haunting tale that seems to hint just too much at the eldritch horrors of
the Mythos.
One of the two game scripts I wrote for Cthulhu Live Second Edition, "The
Magna of Illusion", is directly based on the Imaginos album... filling in
some of the mysteries and extending the storyline spun through the album
to
the climax after World War I that Imaginos falls just shy of describing.
The script details the long and sinister life of Captain DelRio (with a
particularly evil journal I might add) and reveals the true horrors of the
Magna of Illusion, that black mirror which slept within the Temple of Jade
and was stolen from the jungle by fire and blood to rest in the attic in
Cornwall... preparing itself and growing fat on the suffering of Europe.
As
you can probably tell... I like that album. :-) And certainly must
recommend "The Magna of Illusion" in CL 2d Edition to any BOC fans on the
list.
Robert "Mac" McLaughlin
Cthulhu Live
http://www.cthulhulive.com
From: "James Holloway"
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 00 07:46AM PDT
Another source to consider:
in Pagan's 1991 chapbook "Stark Raving MAD," Kevin Ross wrote a short
article detailing an entity/tome known as the Queen in Red. He related it
to
Liszt's Totentanz and the piece of art (Orcagna's "Trimuph of Death?" memory
fails me...) which inspired it.
Ross was drawing on the Blue Oyster Cult reference in this article.
James Holloway
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