The One Literary Reference You Must Know to Appreciate True Detective
Michael M. Hughes
Two episodes into the series, True Detective dropped a reference to one of the strangest, most compelling tales in the canon of weird fiction: Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, a collection of short stories published in 1895. Knowing this book is key to understanding the dark mystery at the heart of this series.
This collection of stories has influenced writers from H.P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, to Robert Heinlein, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin. The King in Yellow and his legendary city of Carcosa may be the most famous character and setting you've never heard of.
In fact, the more of the show you watch, and the more carefully you pay attention, you'll find a number of Easter eggs aimed squarely at hardcore fans of the weird fiction genre. I'll touch on a few of the more prominent ones, but I have a feeling the rest of the series will be a bonanza for true detectives of strange fiction.
Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
—The King in Yellow: Act I, Scene 2
The King in Yellow is a fictional play within a collection of short stories—a metafictional dramatic work that brings despair, depravity, and insanity to anyone who reads it or sees it performed. Chambers inserts only a few selected scenes from the play into his story collection, and all of them are from the first act. This act, we are told, is a bit of a honeypot, luring readers into the cursed text. If they read even the first few words of Act II they are driven insane by the revelation of horrible, decadent, incomprehensible truths about the universe.
Anyone familiar with Lovecraft's "cosmic horrors" should see the thematic similarity. For his unfortunate protagonists, the ultimate truths of the universe are too much for their overloaded minds to handle. It should not be surprising that Lovecraft incorporated Chambers's The King in Yellow into his overarching Cthulhu mythos, embellishing the elements of the story and adding the fictitious play to his growing bookshelf of equally fictional mythos tomes.
Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.
—Cassilda's Song in The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene II
For many fans of weird fiction, the surprising appearance of this madness-inducing play into what ostensibly appeared to be just another police procedural was a bolt of lightning. Suddenly, the tone of the show changed completely, signaling the descent into a particular brand of horror rarely (if ever) seen on television. The first mention of the play comes in episode two when Rust Cohle, the cynical, nihilistic detective played by Matthew McConaughey, finds the journal of a young former prostitute, Dora Lange, who has been ritualistically murdered.
"I closed my eyes and saw the King in Yellow moving through the forest," Cohle reads aloud from her journal. "The King's children are marked. They became his angels."
True Detective: Pizzolatto wehrt Plagiatsvorwürfe ab Spoilerwarnung - Diese Meldung kann Hinweise auf die Fortführung der Handlung enthalten!
Matthew McConaughey als Rust Cohle in „True Detective“ (c) HBO
Henning Harder am Freitag, 8.August 2014 15.00 Uhr
Nic Pizzolatto, Showrunner des HBO-Kritikerlieblings True Detective, musste sich Anfang der Woche mit dem Vorwurf des Plagiarismus auseinandersetzen. Nun nahm er selbst Stellung zu dieser Behauptung.
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