Carcosa. Black stars rise. The Yellow King. All of these phrases that came from the mouths of the most unhinged characters across True Detective's eight episodes have their origins in Robert W Chambers' insanely influential and sort of obscure 1895 book The King in Yellow. I say sort of obscure; as soon as people made the connection between Chambers' book and True Detective, it shot up Amazon's bestseller list (partly because it's out of copyright and so free on Kindle). Also, to be fair, Carcosa doesn't totally originate with The King in Yellow. It was actually named in Ambrose Bierce's 1893 book Can Such Things Be?, but it's Chambers who fully fleshed out the mythos that True Detective drew upon. The book is made up of a series of interlinked short stories revolving around the (fictional) titular play, which drives anyone who reads it mad. All the stuff about black stars, twin suns, and taking off masks come from the excerpts of the play that are sprinkled throughout the stories. Not only that, but the ubiquitous spiral seen carved into people's backs, painted on buildings and flown in by flocks of birds can been seen as an interpretation of the Yellow King's symbol from the book. Amongst other things, Chambers influenced the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft, a man whose fiction was no stranger to the crushing, unimaginable evil mankind are constantly under threat of. True Detective grounded that feeling a little, but the oppressive and unrelenting nastiness that's present throughout the first season is just as evident as The King in Yellow. And if you actually read it, you'll have one up on your friends who still don't understand what all this Carcosa business is about.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
