My lost heart bled beneath the sands
Of distant, dead Carcosa.
My heart, once buried, fed the land
That grew the oak Carcosa.The oak was felled and burned to light
Those dim shores of Carcosa.
Love’s but a candle. Soon I’ll die
To wander lost Carcosa.My love’s a dream, and dreams must die
To resurrect Carcosa.
My dream is dead. My queen’s alive.
She conquers bright Carcosa.
—Joe Koch, The Wingspan of Severed Hands 79
A dry description of The Wingspan of Severed Hands might be something like: “a short novel that reimagines Robert W. Chambers’ mythology of The King in Yellow with distinct feminist themes, a nonlinear narrative, and surreal imagery.” Which would not do justice to the language or the story. This is a story with texture and attitude, occupying a grey area between cosmic horror, body horror, magical realism, surrealism, and splatterpunk. Like a gelatinous eyeball, it’s not easy to nail down; and it resists easy labeling.
Much of the effectiveness of the story lies in its deliberately ambiguous, unsettled nature. The narrative shifts from familiar scenes and scenarios to nightmarish episodes, the transition often seamless and in a condition of otherwise banal reality, so that the readers are left wondering how much is really happening and how much is undiagnosed psychotic episode or hallucination. There is a loving richness to the description of mutilation, decay, graphic violence, bodily corruption, and growth that is a stylistic hallmark of Koch’s work, an evident love and appreciation for the language and imagery of transformation.
Trying to capture in words that fascinating process of transition. From girl to woman, life to death, caterpillar to butterfly, steak to ground beef, health cell to cancerous, girlfriend to ex. Wrapped up in and around a reinterpretation of the Yellow Mythos.
There are, broadly speaking, two horizons of the Yellow Mythos. The first horizon derives directly from Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895) and the mythology of the same. Folks might expand on it, re-intrepret it, but it is distinctly tied to the original snippets of the play. Works of this sort include “Cordelia’s Song from The King in Yellow” (1938) by Vincent Starrett & “Evening Reflections, Carcosa” (2011) by Ann K. Schwader, “Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars” (2012) by Gemma Files, and Black Stars Above (2019) by Lonnie Nadler & Jenna Cha. They’re not all consistent, the authors aren’t all in communion with each other, but they’re all drawing more or less directly on Chambers.
The post-Classical horizon of Yellow Mythos stories comes to the Yellow Mythos more indirectly, usually through popular culture like the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, which popularized images like the three-limbed figure of the Yellow Sign designed by Kevin Ross in 1989, or the American Gothic sensibilities of the first season of True Detective created by Nic Pizzolatto. Post-Classical is less beholden to Chambers, more directly influenced by the imagery and ideas of what the Yellow Mythos is in the popular consciousness—which can be both very freeing and very constraining, depending on whether the creator hews close to what someone else has done or pushes outward to define their own space. A good example of this might be the Alagadda series of the SCP-wiki, which draws inspiration from the first horizon stories but is more adjacent to it than directly connected.
The Wingspan of Severed Hands is in the second horizon. It’s a post-Kevin Ross piece, the three-legged image of the Yellow Sign derived from the roleplaying game; the Queen in Yellow is similar to the Hanged King in the Alagadda series, a new riff on a familiar concept. Yet the actual references to Chambers are few; Koch draws more strongly off the mass of post-Chambers ideas than Chambers himself. There’s no play, no Cordelia, and the madness inspired by the Yellow Sign is an outbreak more in line with an RPG in mid-apocalypse.
The Yellow Mythos in this story is a kind of lifeline to the reader. Something familiar that they can keep a hold of during a narrative that changes perspective as it winds its way through time and space. Yet at the same time, it’s not Chambers’ mythos. There are surprises in store, odd pieces that might not jive with what a reader familiar with Yellow Mythos stories thinks is going on.
It is, all in all, much more personal.
Three women. One battle.
A world gone mad. Cities abandoned. Dreams invade waking minds. An invisible threat lures those who oppose its otherworldly violence to become acolytes of a nameless cult. As a teenage girl struggles for autonomy, a female weapons director in a secret research facility develops a living neuro-cognitive device that explodes into self-awareness. Discovering their hidden emotional bonds, all three unveil a common enemy through dissonant realities that intertwine in a cosmic battle across hallucinatory dreamscapes.
Time is the winning predator, and every moment spirals deeper into the heart of the beast.
—Joe Koch, The Wingspan of Severed Hands back cover copy
This is a story focused on women. There aren’t many male characters, and while the actions of the men and boys are not peripheral to the story, we don’t get their viewpoint and their actions are critical largely with regard to how they treat the women who are the viewpoint characters. We don’t see husbands, fathers, brothers, or sons; there’s an implicit matriarchial arrangement to the story. Mothers, daughters, and grandmothers are the main relationships, and that’s the emotional heart of the book. The suffering that goes into these toxic relationships, invisible to so many, that finds manifestation in so many little ways.
Yet at the same time, the relationships in the book represent a closed circle. The viewpoint characters don’t really have any women friends to turn to, no support network. They are isolated, locked in—in a trailer, in a bunker, in a cage, in a decaying body, in a cycle of expectations and recriminations, haunted by a past that they cannot escape until the climax.
The end of The Wingspan of Severed Hands is the beginning of a new life. An opportunity for at least some of the viewpoint characters to move on, out of the shadow of motherly expectations, grief, and trauma. The reward for all the gooey, gory, traumatic, painful growth and transformation in the story is…the potential for more growth. Maybe even to be happy, although the ending is not itself exactly happy.
One of the themes suggested, but not fully explored, in The Wingspan of Severed Hands is the nature of The King in Yellow itself. So many writers have focused on what Chambers did, what he wrote, the things he hinted at. Yet if one day, if you opened up a book marked with the Yellow Sign on its spine, and found it blank—how would you fill the pages? What would you write? What would The King in Yellow be in your own words?
The Wingspan of Severed Hands (2020) by Joe Koch was published by Weird Punk Books.
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos .
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