Carmen and Blanca are always on the lookout for a new kink, but lately nothing has been able to get them out of the rut they’re in. When Blanca finds the enigmatic Smoke down in a drug den, suddenly things are looking up.
Smoke holds the pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. If you read too much of the play, you’ll fall into madness, but if you read just a little then pull back, the madness gives you an adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria. Carman is soon in the clutches of a game of lust at the edge of a nightmare.
The line between reality and the world Carmen visits after reading the game begins to blur, and she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.
Why we’re excited about this book:
A new book by Hailey Piper is always a damn good reason to celebrate. The author of A Light Most Hateful, All the Hearts You Eat, Cruel Angels Past Sundown, The Ghostlands of Natalie Glasgow, Cranberry, and Queen of Teeth among others, her short fiction has been featured in such publications as Weird Tales, The Bad Book, Fear of Clowns, Not All Monsters: A Strangehouse Anthology By Women Of Horror, and is collected in Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy. With her latest, Piper twists a cosmic horror classic into the modern age with a tale of kinky obsession and madness. Eric Larocca (At Dark, I Become Loathsome, You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood) says: “Surreal, disquieting, and wholly absorbing, Hailey Piper’s A Game in Yellow possesses such suffocating power to bewilder, to enchant, and to completely overwhelm the reader. Written with the provocativeness of a Lynchian fever dream and the sophistication of a story by Lovecraft, this is Piper’s most arresting and satisfying work yet. A novel centered around mythology, obsession, sexuality, fetish, and the facade of the dramatic and the theatrical—I surrendered gladly and this book melted my brain.”, and Christopher Golden (The House of Last Resort) calls the book “Audacious as hell, with the broken heart and searing talent to make it sing.”
Releasing from Saga Press 12 August 2025,A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA