There’s not really much to say here other than that Nic Pizzolatto and HBO have done more interesting things with the material than the original author.
I only heard about this because it turns out to be part of the mythos, if you will, for HBO’s True Detective; Amazon jumped on the bandwagon and made the Kindle edition of The King in Yellow free a few weeks back, and so I snagged it to read on vacation. (It’s still free, if you want to sample it.)
Honestly, it’s kind of bland, and not really worth your time. Only the first few stories even reference the titular King, and in those it’s generally in a very Lovecraftian thing-you-should-not-know sense. My advice: skip it.
Interesting choice. I read a couple of Chambers’ stories in an anthology called The Hastur Cycle, one of a group of books from RPG maker Chaosium that delve into particular parts of the Cthulhu Mythos, with stories that run the gamut from source material to modern interpretations, and generally include the original Lovecraft material too. Hard to find, but great for geeks like me. I’ve been planning to rent/binge watch True Detective (I don’t have HBO) as soon as I can because of the King in Yellow angle. I remember from the Chambers stories I read that he (like Lovecraft) was given to using racist language, but then Lovecraft pretty much hated everybody.