A Game In Yellow - A Review

A Game in Yellow is disturbing. But don’t take that the wrong way. It’s disturbing in the way a work of horror fiction should be — filled with eerie creeping dread that oozes into your brain, and provoking uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, as you interact with the prose. This novel will, like its protagonist, push you to the brink and leave you transformed.

In Piper’s A Game in Yellow, we meet Carmen and Blanca, a kinky couple whose relationship is cracking because of Carmen’s increasing emotional distance. To help her lover, Blanca finds a “third”, Smoke, to bring into their sexual play and lives. Smoke introduces Carmen to the cursed play, The King in Yellow. Reading this work will lead to insanity and death — but if one reads but a little and stops, the reader experiences a rush of drug-like euphoria. Desperate to feel again and be with Blanca, Carmen reads from the play, and soon becomes obsessed. The result is a walk through loneliness and longing, regret, and addiction and an inexorable spiral into the void.

A Game in Yellow pulled me in and gripped me in a yellow taloned hand. I felt in equal measures turned on and profoundly discomfited  - to where, twice while reading chapters before sleeping, nightmares jolted me awake, terrified while I fumbled for the light and peered into the corners of the room for shadow cloaked figures. (To be fair, I have an overactive imagination, and am prone to weird, unsettling dreams.).

The pace of the book was relentless, and I lost myself, immersed in Piper’s prose. Though not into “kink” myself, I applaud the author’s ability to bring me into this world and make me see through the character’s eyes to appreciate all their different shades of humanity — the sexy parts, the ugly parts, the painful parts.

I cannot recommend this book enough. A Game in Yellow is unflinching, glorious, and casts a dark glamour over you that you won’t soon forget as the twin suns sink behind the lake, and the shadows lengthen in Carcosa.