A Game in Yellow

Piper (All the Hearts You Eat) deftly combines sapphic erotica with Robert W. Chambers’s 1895 cosmic horror classic The King in Yellow to create a mesmerizing, disorienting, and original tale of terror and ecstasy. Carmen is bored, with her job and the world at large. In an attempt to reinvigorate their sex life, Carmen’s girlfriend introduces her to Salt, a mysterious woman with access to a book that brings euphoria if read in snippets; however, read too much, and madness will follow. After experiencing the rush of adrenaline and arousal upon her first glimpse of the book, Carmen becomes obsessed with it and wants more. She keeps reading, even as she begins to hallucinate, and the images of twin black suns fray her tether to reality. Then the book itself starts to read Carmen, as Chambers’s dense prose slowly morphs to reveal Carmen’s own deep secrets.