Carcosa

 

   It’s a rainy evening in the City of Angels, and I have hot chocolate keeping me warm, and a black cat at my feet and it’s perfect for me to write about the mythical city known as Carcosa. My most recent conversation about the fabled city was with a friend and we were talking about television shows, and I asked her to check out True Detective, Season One. In it, two detectives come across a horrific and ritualistic murder scene and during its investigation, there are clues that reference Carcosa, as well as The King in Yellow which I will get to in a moment. There are scenes in the series that make you question their reality, or at least question the mind of one of the detectives, and at the end there is Carcosa. But what is its origin?

   The first time Carcosa is written about is in An Inhabitant of Carcosa written by Ambrose Bierce in 1886. Bierce’s character speaks only in hindsight about the mythical city after its destruction, “The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place.” Bierce also penned the short work Haita the Shepard that will also inspire other authors as well by introducing Hastur, a god.

 

   Robert W. Chambers will add to that Carcosa mythos in his book of short stories entitled The King in Yellow which was published in 1895. In the first story, The Repairer of Reputations, the tales began with a song:

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

—"Cassilda's Song" in The King in Yellow Act 1, Scene 2

   The story itself is amazing for it is set in a futuristic world of the 1920s where we have just come out of a war with Germany. When the main character is injured falling off of his horse, in his convalescing he will read a play named The King in Yellow, “This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forgive Carcosa where black stars hand in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse this writer as the artist has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth- a world which now tremble before the King in Yellow.” It is, in essence, a book that will drive the reader insane.

    H.P. Lovecraft will continue the story told by Bierce and Chambers in his 26,000-word novella The “Whisperer in the Darkness” that was published in Weird Tales in 1931. In his tale, the main character is a folklorist who stumbles across some information, “I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum…” The Lake of Hali and the character of Hastur are mentioned in Bierce’s literature and “The Yellow Sign” is the name of a short story by Chambers. In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft comments, “Chambers must have been impressed with 'An Inhabitant of Carcosa' & 'Haita the Shepherd', which were first published during his youth. But he even improves on Bierce in creating a shuddering background of horror—a vague, disquieting memory which makes one reluctant to use the faculty of recollection too vigorously."

   Even George R.R. Martin cannot escape the walls of Carcosa. In his book “A Song of Ice and Fire” published in 1996 a city named Carcosa is next to a large lake in the East. In the novel it is mentioned that a sorcerer lord lives there who claims to be the sixty-ninth Yellow Emperor from a dynasty fallen for a thousand years.

   Carcosa is even available for players to explore in The Call of Cthulhu Role Playing Game. In that game we leave Carcosa for others to explore and go mad in. At this point I would like to mention in season 4 of True Detectives, which I have not seen, there is another literature Easter egg, that of Jodie Foster reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

   
Even though the city of Carcosa was first mentioned almost 140 years ago, it continues to be part of today’s literary and pop culture worlds. May the twin suns of Carcosa shine forever.