www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jacob...

Um... buy my book? Out January 2026

Over time, a great deal of the pseudo-academic content was edited out, as the horror/thriller elements of the novel took precedence. But the rotten kernel of my novel remains a work of paranoid literary interpretation, so I get excited when people post about The King in Yellow like this

And that's how the world of my forthcoming novel, THE TRUTH OF CARCOSA was born. My essays became a Special Report by one of the narrators, a despicable individual more than a little like Hildred Castaigne

I realised that the totalising schema with which I wanted to unite my musings in these essays didn't exist in the real world, or the almost-real world of serious academia. It became necessary to create an alternative reality in which my interpretation of The King in Yellow was supreme

I contracted COVID. I suffered from long fevers. The world continued to fall into darkness and confusion. More than anything I wanted to understand the connections apparent in the stories in The King in Yellow. I wanted to demonstrate mastery of that field if nothing else

I was interested in the ways in which "academic" writing can mirror the echoing chambers of an unsound mind. I wrote more essays, about other stories in The King in Yellow. I became entranced by the deployment of signs (literal Yellow Signs) connecting the stories

I started out by writing an essay about this story. While I was writing, my academic persona morphed into something more paranoid, more prone to digression. I started emulating Hildred Castaigne, narrator of The Repairer of Reputations, a man swimming in a sea of bad affect from without and within

Agree! The Repairer of Reputations is absolutely my favourite story in the collection - and so prescient with its proto-fascist setting