Shelf Control is a weekly feature created by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. Since early January 2023, Shelf Control has moved base to Literary Potpourri. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile and write a post about it–what it’s about, when/where you got it, why you want to read it and such.
There's a confusing story of how this book ended up on my TBR. Given that it is a King in Yellow story, that should almost be a given at this point! :-D
Back in 2018, before I started my Cosmic Horror reading in earnest (both of the King in Yellow and the Cthulhu lore), I read a book called The Rites of Azathoth by Frank Cavallo. I had enough Lovecraft reading under my belt to read it without being lost and I must say, I wasn't exactly impressed. Several very unlikeable characters, the elder god Azathoth trying to prevent the destruction of Earth (Azathoth is the essence of destruction in the HP Lovecraft lore) and a LOT of profanity all came together in one mediocre 2.5star rating.
By 2023 I was well on my way to reading a lot of the King in Yellow stories and stumbled across a full novel by James Hodge, The Yellow Sign. I was incredibly impressed but that was Hodge's only book that I could find. I continued searching out other King in Yellow anthologies and stories but had to take a break due to the unrelenting grimness and hopelessness of the Mythos as a whole.
Fast forward to 2026 and I decided to get back into the KiY books again. The problem was, and continues to be, that my memory can no longer retain all of the information about what I've read in the past. It is one of the big reasons I review every book I read and keep an electronic review copy in Calibre. My brain needs memory aides. Just to give you some perspective, yesterday's book "Outpost" was my 4878th book read since April 2000. So I knew that I wanted more King in Yellow stories and I "remembered" that I had read a full novel by somebody and that I thoroughly enjoyed it. So I googled up some info and found this book and the author's name rang a bell and I thought "Oh, it must be the guy who did the full KiY novel I enjoyed so much in the past".
So I added "The King and the Pallid Mask" to my tbr, only to realize as I started writing this post that all of my assumptions were completely wrong. Which means that I have NO idea what I'll be getting into when I eventually do read this. I consider that a big positive though, as the King in Yellow cannot be contained by a mere human mind, hahahahaa ;-)
That wraps up this post. Literary Potpourri's latest Shelf Control post can be found HERE. Please do visit it and say hello.
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