The King In Yellow By Robert W. Chambers, discussing the use of the book "The King In Yellow" in the a Options

The book by Chambers, The King In Yellow, tells a variety of stories having to do with a play called The King In Yellow. Whenever one of the characters reads the play, something bad befalls them or people around them. Most of the time they go insane; in the least, they are plagued by a fever.

One of the stories in particualr, "The Yellow Sign," tells of the actual being called the King in Yellow, or, through interpretation, his avatar or avant-garde. He shows up after both of the characters read The King In Yellow and figure out that the black and gold pin that one of them was wearing was The Yellow Sign. The masked figure rips the pin away from the man and kills the girl by opening up his cape to her.

My question was whether or not this fictional "book within a book," or, even, the yellow sign itself, could be used in magick. It seems that it is possible to use it, just as people have used the Necronomicon as a focus for their work with the Cthulhu Mythos even though it was never written by the mysterious arab Abdul Alhazred.

My other question is not whether it can or cannot be used, but how it should be used.
my ideas for it are as follows:

-calling forth Hastur or The King In Yellow (hastur had been referred to as a being and a place in Chambers's works) to bring about knowledge of the present, past, and future.

-invoking either Hastur or The King In Yellow and using the "yellow sign" to curse someone to illness/madness/death.

-calling to the Yellow-masked Priest to bring abotut chaos/change in a manner you wish.

-using the "yellow sign" as a test for initiations.

-using the "Yellow Sign"/an invocation/evocation of Hastur/The King in Yellow to call forth the dead.

All of these seem a little exteme and one sided to me, but maybe the rest of you can figure out something better.

btw, I am also wondering if this post is unde the correct heading. I assumed something somewhat Cthulhian/Lovecraftian would go under chaos magick, but I may have been mistaken.

This little lemon-yellow hardcover is worth reading.

"The Repairer of Reputations" is truly bizarre. Did he really have the crown jewels of the Hyades, or was he just a lunatic? And how did the Prince's Emblazoned end up in the trash dump?

"The Yellow Sign" reminds me of the story of Lord Dufferin's coffin.

The story about the statuary solution blends sci-fi with mystery.

R.A. Wilson connects the Yellow Sign to the Lloigor, the parasitic aliens from Arcturus who kept the dinosaurs under telepathic control by Ghatanothoa of Aldebaran. Other stories also hint that the Yellow Sign invokes some sort of alien mind-control. Hastur himself though is an "outer god" or natural principle, and not a conscious entity in itself.

At the ruin of Mu, Ghatanothoa (the eldest spawn of Cthulhu, the Red Dragon or Satanachia of the grimoires) was deposed from Yaddith-Gho and cast (as a brain-tube of the Mi-Go) into the Leviathan of Ys, from whence it can only project telepathic imagery and is called Ghadamon. This is more or less identical in function to Nyarlathothtep and may be the same entity, the many manifestations of Nyarlathothtep being merely projections of the primary servant of the Great Old Ones. It could be said that the talisman of Yhe is actually the Yellow Sign itself, used to cast down the dragon and and make way for the epoch of Ythogtha.

The whole mythos ends up being more complicated than the Bible and twice as confusing even once you know a great deal about it. The Yellow Sign remains a mystery and since you'll have to pretty much make it up in order to use it for anything, you might as well go with what inspires you and check your results against your best judgment.