What makes this all the more surprising is that, so far, The King in Yellow remains as unseen in True Detective as it was in Chambers’s work: something tantalizingly hinted at and lurking beyond the margins but never revealed. Now, in 2014, this meta-book has suddenly become the key to the mystery at the center of HBO’s breakout new show, True Detective–a viral resurgence that has caused Chambers’s book (with the help of an article on popular science-fiction blog io9) to catapult to the top of the Amazon bestseller lists. It is one of the first fictional meta-books, a literary device that has been used since by authors as diverse as Agatha Christie, Franz Kafka, H.P. Although The King in Yellow has been an obscure reference indeed for most of the last hundred years, it was truly ahead of its time.
