The Repairer of Reputations

by Ed Park, Robert W. Chambers

Genres: General Fiction; Asian American; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

In this lavishly illustrated flip volume hardcover, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park presents a new tale of contemporary cosmic horror on one side, with his inspiration from Robert W. Chambers’s horror classic The King in Yellow printed on the other.

Designed and illustrated by Jeff Wong, the award-winning artist of Weird Tales magazine, this objet features a flip volume dual-sided cover, illustrated full-color endpapers, and interior art.

Sid Feelings, a successful children’s entertainer, is trapped in a modern nightmare. She’s canceled when a man with whom she shares a name commits a heinous crime. The trouble is only beginning when she hires a mysterious specialist to salvage what’s left of her career. Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park’s “The Repairer of Reputations” offers an all-too-real hellscape at the intersection of slashers and cyberspace.

On the flip side of this gorgeously illustrated volume, Park presents the horror classic that inspired him: Robert W. Chambers’s “The Repairer of Reputations,” the groundbreaking tale of paranoia and obsession that launched The King in Yellow.

Release date: September 29, 2026

Publisher: Hell's Hundred

Print pages: 160

Sample

Chapter 1


He couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Two months earlier, a thirty-three-year-old ex-con entered the gated community of Hash Valley, in a van stolen from a local florist. He wore fatigues, a tan tool vest, sunglasses. He gestured to the guard, busy on his phone, that he had to make a delivery. The guard waved him through without asking for ID. It was ten after six, a Thursday. The temperature was a steady seventy degrees.

From above, Hash Valley resembled a huge Pac-Man board, symmetrical and mazelike. Security footage showed the vehicle driving down the main street, past two stop signs, before turning right and pulling into an open garage. The intruder entered through the unlocked door, bringing equipment in a large knapsack. The whole family happened to be home. He forced everyone into the basement and did not emerge for hours. Even the dog was not spared. Nothing of material value appeared to be taken, though investigators noted the den was in disarray, books scattered across the carpet, and the aquarium in one of the children’s rooms had been smashed. Before leaving, he torched the upstairs hall, then the rooms of the first floor.

She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The flames tore through the house. Unable to reach the garage, the man exited by the sliding kitchen door and took off on foot. (A key was later found on the patio and determined to match the ignition of the molten van.) It was eight thirty. As the fire department worked to contain the blaze, Hash Valley security and local police searched for the suspect. A couple playing tennis reported a man wandering by the courts “as though in a dream.” He was clutching a pitchfork, found near an empty house that the absentee owners were prepping to flip. He had no identification.

She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The ghastly crime dominated the local news for the next month, and thereafter hardly a week passed without some new development. The random nature of the invasion, the lack of remorse (and demonic good looks) of the accused, and the victims’ stature as beacons of goodness guaranteed its appearance in national papers as well. (The parents led calmness workshops at a healing center, where they both worked in development.) Who was this fiend? What had possessed him? The Hash Valley Murders eventually found a half-life on cable talk shows and online forums. They inspired an episode of a crime drama that shifted the setting to rural Vermont.

All that would come later. For now, she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

As the case developed, the suspect spun a wild account of what happened that evening in Hash Valley. He said his primary goal had been to capture the “enchanted icon,” and that “the other man” had deviated from the script by adding arson, torture, and things the investigators said they would never forget, could never forgive. But what other man? Had an accomplice died in the fire? Authorities deemed this a fabrication. Yet the man in captivity persisted in his story, imputing Svengali-like powers to a mysterious “older one.”

The next week, an unsigned note arrived at TV stations and newspaper offices in a twenty-mile radius. “I’m no saint myself, but the man you have in custody is the meanest human being I’ve seen in all my years,” read the typewritten missive, later traced to Camp Pendleton. “His name is Sid Feelings but he has no feelings.”