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Published in 1895, the Repairer of Reputations is the first of a collection of ten short stories in a book titled The King in Yellow written by American writer Robert William Chambers.

Celebrated as a classic in the supernatural and horror genre, the Repairer of Reputations begins with a survey of what the author imagines will be the political and social situation in the year 1920. One of its features is official support for voluntary euthanasia – the first Government Lethal Chamber being set up in New York where the story begins.

After a few pages of this interesting Wellsian style future history the tale becomes personal and we suddenly get the first of many indications that our narrator, a chap called Hildred Castaigne, is not all there. He informs us that after a fall from his horse he was obliged to undergo treatment for insanity by a Dr Archer, whom he doesn’t forgive for that diagnosis. After the doctor decides he’s recovered, he unwisely told Hildred to look him up and give him a call from time to time, whereupon Hildred, smiling, told him he would indeed, to get even with him. Dr Archer dismissed Castaigne as joking, although the truth is more sinister.

It’s not just that Castaigne had suffered a knock on the head when he fell from his horse. During his convalescence he experiences a worse misfortune which sends his mind permanently over the edge, namely the shock of reading The King in Yellow - a play written by an unknown author of such virulence that it drives anyone that read it over the edge. Such was the strength of its contagion that the play was banned worldwide.

From that point on, as he shares his thoughts with the reader, Castaigne piles up the evidence against himself with ever-increasing dramatic irony.
Castaigne is friends with a fellow-reader of the accursed book. This man, named Wilde, is a blackmailer, “The Repairer of Reputations” of the story’s title. Wilde is probably as insane as Castaigne and even more outwardly eccentric, but also seems to have some real psychic ability, evinced when he manages to locate a missing part of a suit of armour which an expert armourer could not find.

Whatever the truth of Wilde’s claims to be at the head of a huge conspiracy to gain power, Castaigne sees this connection, in accordance with hints he derives from The King in Yellow, as his chance to become King of America. At one point, while admiring himself wearing his "golden jewelled crown", his sane cousin Louis caught him. Asking Hildred to put down the "brass crown - a theatrical tinsel", he further describes the elaborate safe Hildred had kept the crown in as nothing more than a biscuit box.

Castaigne bottles up his rage on that occasion but his control is starting to slip. The final scene explodes into an inferno of the narrator’s obsessions and delusions, terrifyingly displayed from the inside. Seeing Louis as a contender for his crown, Castaigne demands that he renounce it; Louis humours him but Castaigne then announces he has cut Dr Archer’s throat and has arranged the death of Louis’ fiancee Constance. In truth he had got Wilde to coerce one of his blackmail victims, called Vance, to agree to murder Constance, and just at that moment he sees the miserable Vance rushing to the Government Lethal Chamber and assumes this is out of remorse and that the deed is done. However it turns out that Constance is still alive, and Vance must have chosen death as a way of freeing himself from Wilde. Wilde himself is dead, killed by the feral cat he kept baiting.
The police are summoned and close in on the shrieking narrator, and a final editorial note tells us that he “died yesterday in the Asylum for the Criminally Insane”.

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