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The Truth of Carcosa
Evil books, shadowy corporations, and interdimensional monster collide in this dark, masterful tribute to Robert Chamber's cult classic, The King in Yellow.
In 1984, exiled author Salvatore Archimboldi accepts the help of a psychotherapist to write his new book. He hopes to transform his traumatic memories into literary genius. But the resulting book, The Truth of Carcosa, is pure evil. Horrified, Archimboldi suppresses the book and wills all traces of it, his correspondence, and any copies to be destroyed.
Long after Archimboldi's death, in a chaotic age of resurgent nationalism and violence, one of the only havens for his work is the ALI, the Archive for Literary Investment, where a biographer and his protégée search through Archimboldi’s correspondence for clues on the evil manuscript as they attempt to stop unscrupulous firms with their own plans for the manuscript.
Told from the perspective of a madman obsessed with The Truth of Carcosa and a ragtag group of friends, it becomes clear that this book is more than a book—and that it might be the answer to a bewildering set of
Why is the Archive so desperate to preserve Archimboldi's work?
Why do so many corporations seem hellbent on seizing any scrap of this mysterious manuscript—and at whatever cost?
What are the strange, dancing monsters that appear wherever Archimboldi's work is discovered?
And who—or what—is the Yellow King?
In 1984, exiled author Salvatore Archimboldi accepts the help of a psychotherapist to write his new book. He hopes to transform his traumatic memories into literary genius. But the resulting book, The Truth of Carcosa, is pure evil. Horrified, Archimboldi suppresses the book and wills all traces of it, his correspondence, and any copies to be destroyed.
Long after Archimboldi's death, in a chaotic age of resurgent nationalism and violence, one of the only havens for his work is the ALI, the Archive for Literary Investment, where a biographer and his protégée search through Archimboldi’s correspondence for clues on the evil manuscript as they attempt to stop unscrupulous firms with their own plans for the manuscript.
Told from the perspective of a madman obsessed with The Truth of Carcosa and a ragtag group of friends, it becomes clear that this book is more than a book—and that it might be the answer to a bewildering set of
Why is the Archive so desperate to preserve Archimboldi's work?
Why do so many corporations seem hellbent on seizing any scrap of this mysterious manuscript—and at whatever cost?
What are the strange, dancing monsters that appear wherever Archimboldi's work is discovered?
And who—or what—is the Yellow King?
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First published January 13, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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December 15, 2025With the recent resurgence in Robert W. Chambers-inspired cosmic horror, such as the wonderful A Game in Yellow from Hailey Piper and the epic sword-and-sorcery spin in Jonathan Maberry's Kagen the Damned novels, I had high hopes for Jacob Rollinson's debut.
The Truth of Carcosa unfolds in dual narratives, one half being your traditional third-person presentation and the other an epistolary via a written report from which the book gains it's name. It starts off as a nicely literary work, and the near-future setting of a London in the throes of a civil war against the far-right fascists that have seized control makes for one hell of a relatable and compelling entry point given our current state of affairs.
Sadly, nearly a hundred pages in, Rollinson's Carcosa has shed any sense of immediacy and poignancy, along with the more interesting aspects of its setting. What started off with compelling promise has given way to the slowest of slow burns, with each page becoming a lead weight upon the narrative. Twenty-one percent in, and I've lost absolutely all interest. I'm bored and finding little reason to pick up this book again, so I'm out.
The Truth of Carcosa unfolds in dual narratives, one half being your traditional third-person presentation and the other an epistolary via a written report from which the book gains it's name. It starts off as a nicely literary work, and the near-future setting of a London in the throes of a civil war against the far-right fascists that have seized control makes for one hell of a relatable and compelling entry point given our current state of affairs.
Sadly, nearly a hundred pages in, Rollinson's Carcosa has shed any sense of immediacy and poignancy, along with the more interesting aspects of its setting. What started off with compelling promise has given way to the slowest of slow burns, with each page becoming a lead weight upon the narrative. Twenty-one percent in, and I've lost absolutely all interest. I'm bored and finding little reason to pick up this book again, so I'm out.
November 11, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley and Union Square & Co. for the e-ARC. I greatly appreciate it!
THE TRUTH OF CARCOSA is a unique take on THE KING IN YELLOW and his shadowy realm, Carcosa. I loved the references and Easter eggs throughout the story. It’s clear by the analyses of the original stories within this book that the author is an admirer of the Yellow Mythos, and handles the motifs exceptionally well. The manner in which the turmoil unfolds immerses the reader instantly, and how the separate lives of all the characters interweaved and came together in the end was beautifully done. I definitely look forward to revisiting this book on publication date.
THE TRUTH OF CARCOSA is a unique take on THE KING IN YELLOW and his shadowy realm, Carcosa. I loved the references and Easter eggs throughout the story. It’s clear by the analyses of the original stories within this book that the author is an admirer of the Yellow Mythos, and handles the motifs exceptionally well. The manner in which the turmoil unfolds immerses the reader instantly, and how the separate lives of all the characters interweaved and came together in the end was beautifully done. I definitely look forward to revisiting this book on publication date.
January 16, 2026
BWAF Sinister Selection
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: Rollinson takes the “evil book” premise and actually makes it feel dangerous again, not just a cute bookshelf creepypasta. This is a jittery, brainy, occasionally hilarious spiral about archives, state violence, and the unbearable itch to break out of your own skull and finally mean something to someone else. It lands, hard, even when it’s being a weird little freak about it.
Jacob Rollinson is, fittingly, an academic librarian with a creative writing PhD, and you can feel that whole “I have handled strange paper in cold rooms and it has handled me back” energy in every page. He’s published shorter work in lit venues, and this book reads like the moment his interests snap into a bigger, more confident shape: cosmic dread filtered through institutional language, bureaucracy, and the dark comedy of people clinging to procedure while the world liquefies around them.
Our POV is Sol, a man trying to stay sober in a country that’s coming apart at the seams. He falls in with Scottie and Judith Bea as they chase a suppressed manuscript connected to an exiled author, a book so toxic it was meant to be erased. The hunt drags them from grimy city danger into the supposed safety of Greenwood Community, and then right back out again, because safety is always conditional and people get real shitty when they’re scared. A denunciation note about a “Cannibal House” and rumors of skin-changing injections pull them into the orbit of militias, corporate enforcers, and an encroaching something that doesn’t give a damn about human rules.
The book keeps switching the lens you’re looking through, like it’s daring you to keep your footing. A burned-out living room becomes an archaeological dig site, and the plot literally coughs up its own haunted paperwork: a sealed folder containing a “Special Report” and a thick slab of correspondence, turning the novel into a nested dossier that feels both bureaucratic and cursed. It’s a great trick because it makes the reader do the same thing the characters are doing, digging through artifacts, trying to figure out what’s real, what’s propaganda, what’s cope, and what’s infection.
Rollinson also nails the specific modern terror of institutions going feral. There’s a killer scene where a UN-branded “fact finder” shows up and everyone performs order while quietly admitting, basically, nobody’s in charge. The horror isn’t just the cosmic stuff. It’s the way authority keeps changing uniforms, rebranding itself as “procedure,” and demanding obedience while failing to protect anyone.
And then there’s the philosophical hook that gives the dread real meat: loneliness as a structural feature of language, the idea that most of what matters inside you can’t be fully transmitted to anyone else. The “report” sections frame it as loneliness being baked into communication itself, and the novel uses that as both thesis and curse. When the narrative pivots into the claim that “True Communication” might be possible, it doesn’t read like a gothic flourish. It reads like the relapse thought at the edge of a bad night, the moment your brain goes: what if the impossible fix is real though? That is such a smart way to modernize the Carcosa mythos. The King in Yellow is not just a spooky monarch in the distance. It’s the promise of finally being understood. Which is, in human terms, the most dangerous drug imaginable.
Stylistically, this thing is a smartass and I mean that as a compliment. It can do crisp, propulsive paranoia in the “regular” chapters, then turn around and give you these cool, controlled archival passages that feel like someone trying very hard to sound sane while their internal weather turns apocalyptic. The sentences have a clipped, slightly formal bite when they’re in report-mode, and a more breathless physical panic when Sol is moving through spaces where the geometry feels wrong. It’s not purple. It’s not minimalist. It’s that delicious middle: lucid, detailed, and increasingly untrustworthy in a way that makes you keep reading because your brain wants the pattern to resolve.
The themes that linger are the commodification of art and memory, and the way authoritarian hunger always rebrands itself as “safety” and “procedure.” In this world, corporations show up with lawyer-warrants and militias show up with uniforms, and everyone points guns while insisting they are the adults in the room. The cosmic horror expresses those themes by making information itself feel predatory. The book keeps asking what happens when stories, documents, and evidence aren’t neutral but hungry, when they don’t just describe reality but start rewriting it.
By the time the epilogue hits, the story has basically swallowed its own receipts. You get this security-footage vibe, a kind of “here is the official record” artifact that morphs into something like an art film recap of Sol’s ordeal, complete with a disorienting detour into time weirdness and an attempt to solve the problem from inside the system. It’s a bold move because it refuses the comfort of a clean ending. Instead it gives you the true cosmic horror closer: the feeling that the narrative itself has become contaminated, that even the version of events you’re holding in your hands might be part of the trap.
So, if “True Communication” is possible, is it salvation, or just the final form of invasion? Because sure, maybe you don’t have to be lonely anymore. But also, what if the price is that something else finally gets to speak through you?
In the current King in Yellow tribute ecosystem, this one earns its place by not just name-dropping Carcosa, but by making the concept feel like a modern infection: memetic, bureaucratic, and opportunistically monetized. It reads like a strong “arrival” novel, scaling up the author’s weird-comedy-and-dread instincts into something bigger and meaner without losing the bite.
A well-crafted, distinctive mindfuck that weaponizes archives and loneliness into genuine cosmic dread, and it mostly sticks the landing, even when it’s being a spooky little paperwork pervert.
Read if you want cosmic horror that’s also about paperwork, institutions, and social collapse.
Skip if you want cozy occult puzzles instead of “oh shit, the world is peeling”.
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: Rollinson takes the “evil book” premise and actually makes it feel dangerous again, not just a cute bookshelf creepypasta. This is a jittery, brainy, occasionally hilarious spiral about archives, state violence, and the unbearable itch to break out of your own skull and finally mean something to someone else. It lands, hard, even when it’s being a weird little freak about it.
Jacob Rollinson is, fittingly, an academic librarian with a creative writing PhD, and you can feel that whole “I have handled strange paper in cold rooms and it has handled me back” energy in every page. He’s published shorter work in lit venues, and this book reads like the moment his interests snap into a bigger, more confident shape: cosmic dread filtered through institutional language, bureaucracy, and the dark comedy of people clinging to procedure while the world liquefies around them.
Our POV is Sol, a man trying to stay sober in a country that’s coming apart at the seams. He falls in with Scottie and Judith Bea as they chase a suppressed manuscript connected to an exiled author, a book so toxic it was meant to be erased. The hunt drags them from grimy city danger into the supposed safety of Greenwood Community, and then right back out again, because safety is always conditional and people get real shitty when they’re scared. A denunciation note about a “Cannibal House” and rumors of skin-changing injections pull them into the orbit of militias, corporate enforcers, and an encroaching something that doesn’t give a damn about human rules.
The book keeps switching the lens you’re looking through, like it’s daring you to keep your footing. A burned-out living room becomes an archaeological dig site, and the plot literally coughs up its own haunted paperwork: a sealed folder containing a “Special Report” and a thick slab of correspondence, turning the novel into a nested dossier that feels both bureaucratic and cursed. It’s a great trick because it makes the reader do the same thing the characters are doing, digging through artifacts, trying to figure out what’s real, what’s propaganda, what’s cope, and what’s infection.
Rollinson also nails the specific modern terror of institutions going feral. There’s a killer scene where a UN-branded “fact finder” shows up and everyone performs order while quietly admitting, basically, nobody’s in charge. The horror isn’t just the cosmic stuff. It’s the way authority keeps changing uniforms, rebranding itself as “procedure,” and demanding obedience while failing to protect anyone.
And then there’s the philosophical hook that gives the dread real meat: loneliness as a structural feature of language, the idea that most of what matters inside you can’t be fully transmitted to anyone else. The “report” sections frame it as loneliness being baked into communication itself, and the novel uses that as both thesis and curse. When the narrative pivots into the claim that “True Communication” might be possible, it doesn’t read like a gothic flourish. It reads like the relapse thought at the edge of a bad night, the moment your brain goes: what if the impossible fix is real though? That is such a smart way to modernize the Carcosa mythos. The King in Yellow is not just a spooky monarch in the distance. It’s the promise of finally being understood. Which is, in human terms, the most dangerous drug imaginable.
Stylistically, this thing is a smartass and I mean that as a compliment. It can do crisp, propulsive paranoia in the “regular” chapters, then turn around and give you these cool, controlled archival passages that feel like someone trying very hard to sound sane while their internal weather turns apocalyptic. The sentences have a clipped, slightly formal bite when they’re in report-mode, and a more breathless physical panic when Sol is moving through spaces where the geometry feels wrong. It’s not purple. It’s not minimalist. It’s that delicious middle: lucid, detailed, and increasingly untrustworthy in a way that makes you keep reading because your brain wants the pattern to resolve.
The themes that linger are the commodification of art and memory, and the way authoritarian hunger always rebrands itself as “safety” and “procedure.” In this world, corporations show up with lawyer-warrants and militias show up with uniforms, and everyone points guns while insisting they are the adults in the room. The cosmic horror expresses those themes by making information itself feel predatory. The book keeps asking what happens when stories, documents, and evidence aren’t neutral but hungry, when they don’t just describe reality but start rewriting it.
By the time the epilogue hits, the story has basically swallowed its own receipts. You get this security-footage vibe, a kind of “here is the official record” artifact that morphs into something like an art film recap of Sol’s ordeal, complete with a disorienting detour into time weirdness and an attempt to solve the problem from inside the system. It’s a bold move because it refuses the comfort of a clean ending. Instead it gives you the true cosmic horror closer: the feeling that the narrative itself has become contaminated, that even the version of events you’re holding in your hands might be part of the trap.
So, if “True Communication” is possible, is it salvation, or just the final form of invasion? Because sure, maybe you don’t have to be lonely anymore. But also, what if the price is that something else finally gets to speak through you?
In the current King in Yellow tribute ecosystem, this one earns its place by not just name-dropping Carcosa, but by making the concept feel like a modern infection: memetic, bureaucratic, and opportunistically monetized. It reads like a strong “arrival” novel, scaling up the author’s weird-comedy-and-dread instincts into something bigger and meaner without losing the bite.
A well-crafted, distinctive mindfuck that weaponizes archives and loneliness into genuine cosmic dread, and it mostly sticks the landing, even when it’s being a spooky little paperwork pervert.
Read if you want cosmic horror that’s also about paperwork, institutions, and social collapse.
Skip if you want cozy occult puzzles instead of “oh shit, the world is peeling”.
January 18, 2026
On paper, it has all the ingredients for a modern classic: a dual-narrative structure that pits a traditional third-person perspective against a "haunted" bureaucratic dossier, set against the backdrop of a near-future London fracturing under the weight of civil war and far-right extremism.
At first, I was totally hooked. The feeling of a country on the brink felt sharp, relevant, and genuinely scary. But around page one hundred, the story just started to drag. What started as an exciting chase for a forbidden book quickly turned into the slowest of slow burns. It felt like the author cared more about exploring the archive than actually moving the plot forward.
The "Special Report" sections, which I thought would be a creepy found-footage kind of thing, just felt like actual, boring office paperwork: super dry and a real chore to read.
The deep thoughts about loneliness and communication are smart ideas, but they pull you right out of the action until the plot feels more like an academic paper than a thriller.
By the halfway mark, all that urgent political drama was gone, replaced by a "story-within-a-story" gimmick that just kept the reader from connecting with what was happening.
At first, I was totally hooked. The feeling of a country on the brink felt sharp, relevant, and genuinely scary. But around page one hundred, the story just started to drag. What started as an exciting chase for a forbidden book quickly turned into the slowest of slow burns. It felt like the author cared more about exploring the archive than actually moving the plot forward.
The "Special Report" sections, which I thought would be a creepy found-footage kind of thing, just felt like actual, boring office paperwork: super dry and a real chore to read.
The deep thoughts about loneliness and communication are smart ideas, but they pull you right out of the action until the plot feels more like an academic paper than a thriller.
By the halfway mark, all that urgent political drama was gone, replaced by a "story-within-a-story" gimmick that just kept the reader from connecting with what was happening.
February 5, 2026
Similar to
Tell Me I’m Worthless
by Alison Rumfitt (definitely read them together), The Truth of Carcosa examines the rise of fascism in the UK through the lens of horror. In addition to Robert W. Chambers' classic, it also draws from Roberto Bolaño's
2666
with its search for the elusive author, a Latin American named Archimboldi. Unfortunately, Rollinson pulls back from the esoteric ambiguity that characterizes both Chambers and Bolaño in favor of a conventional thriller format that ties up neatly in one of those bombastic fight-for-your-life climaxes that are such a genre cliché. This may be more marketable, but is ultimately a letdown for us cosmic horror aficionados.
February 5, 2026
a prescient geo-political thriller wrapped up in the cosmic horror landscape of robert w chambers. the story within a story within a story rabbit hole gets a bit confusing at times but i think it adds to the overall dizzying narrative.
fans of haunted media will get a lot from this one.
fans of haunted media will get a lot from this one.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
wildly wild and weird ride throughout. the plotting works well and is quite effective, and it felt very grounded in the mythos while offering its own interpretation. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.
January 23, 2026
I loved how this novel interacted and played with Chambers’ work. I don’t know how I feel about the ending though.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews