A brief collection of short stories that had some interesting ideas, but the execution didn't hit at all for me.

I read Harpman's critically acclaimed novel I Who Have Never Known Men back in 2024, and I wasn't nearly as in love with it as everyone else seems to be. I thought it posed a compelling thought experiment, but it never dug deep enough under the surface for my taste. We Were Forbidden, a collection of three short stories first published in its original French in 1995 and only now translated into English, suffers from the same problem: good ideas, shaky execution.

The first story, "The Ardennes Forest", is the most milquetoast of the bunch. It has a more traditional narrative framework in comparison to the following stories and feels aimless in both its plot and its themes; the former is clearly intentional, but the latter just made it a boring experience that left me with a feeling of "What was the point?"

"The Outcast" was a much more affecting read for me, but it's just so repetitive. A translator's note before the story contextualizes it as autobiographical, which makes me slightly forgive how circular it feels (it really does feel like you're overturning a formative childhood betrayal over and over again in your mind), but, again, the problem is that the thematic exploration is also circular. I kept waiting for it to come to a deeper conclusion than was posed earlier on in the story, but it never goes deeper.

"The Broom Closet" had the potential to be a great concluding story, about a writer whose personal life begins blurring between reality and fiction with the story and character she's currently writing, but again... It never goes deeper than it could have and should have to avoid feeling repetitive and frustrating.

After this, I feel like Harpman just isn't an author for me. I have immense respect for writers who can effectively create characters who grapple with protective cognitive dissonance, and it's like... Harpman is almost there for me as one of those writers, but it's like she either lacks the self-awareness to go all the way with it, or else refuses to give that self-awareness to her characters. Either way, the result is a collection of frustrating stories where a deeper and more effective exploration of misogyny and patriarchy dangles, maddeningly, just out of reach.

2/5.

A mixed bag that often made me feel stupid as hell, but whose atmosphere I found compelling and tasty.

(My edition of the collection featured the stories 'The Repairer of Reputations', 'The Mask', 'The Yellow Sign', 'The Demoiselle d'Ys', and 'The Prophets' Paradise').

I truly don't think The King in Yellow needs any introduction, but at its essence, this collection of loosely interconnected metafictional short stories is about a play titled "The King in Yellow" that causes whoever reads it to lose their grip on reality. Each story explores the way this cognitive shift manifests itself in different characters, and for the most part I think each story is effective, even if they do lean too esoteric for my personal taste.

Where Chambers' writing really shines is in dialogue and atmosphere. I often find the dialogue from this era of literature too melodramatic (this goes even for books I love), but while Chambers is also guilty of this on occasion, he equally as often writes dialogue that feels as though real people are talking to each other. But the atmosphere of each story is what really sticks in my head: the dread, the blurring of reality and psychosis, and the imagery especially. I don't think I'll ever be able to get the Lethal Chamber, the Pallid Mask, or the liminal moorland out of my brain.

Each story has its own ups and downs, but my favorite of the bunch is 'The Mask', a story about a group of artists that discover a chemical solution that renders any tangible object into a stunningly beautiful statue when submerged. Incredibly interesting when viewed through the lens of generative AI and its effects on art and artists. My least favourite by a long shot was 'The Demoiselle of d'Ys', mostly because Chambers' romance writing leaves a lot to be desired, and it's where he's at his most melodramatic (and, honestly, I don't understand how it fits into the universe being created in this collection). But MAN, that moorland imagery 😫👌

I'm glad to have finally read such a seminal piece of Gothic and metafiction! I can't say it exactly lived up to the lofty expectations I had, but I can definitely see how so many writers were influenced by it. Once again: the imagery! The atmosphere!

3.5/5.