The Repairer of Reputations

By Ed Park and Robert W. Chambers. Illustrated by award-winning artist Jeff Wong, design director of Weird Tales magazine, this object 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.

Praise

On the Publishers Weekly Top 10 list for Fall 2026 (SF, Fantasy, and Horror)

“With ‘The Repairer of Reputations,’ the multitalented Ed Park riffs on one of Robert W. Chambers’s most famous stories, bringing it into the twenty-first century’s era of instant misinformation and hysteria. A smart, compelling story about the ease and speed with which our lives may unravel, and our inability to look away from ourselves and our personal catastrophes, no matter the consequences.”

—John Langan, author of Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions

“This gorgeous illustrated flip volume collects two stories bearing the same title: the lead tale from Robert W. Chambers’s influential 1895 horror collection The King in Yellow, and a contemporary riff on the material from Pulitzer finalist Park…In the Chambers original, the title character—an eccentric, almost mythical figure who, for a fee, marshals an army of subordinates to rehabilitate tarnished public images—feeds the delusions motivating the tale’s deeply unreliable narrator. Park’s modern reinterpretation tells the story of Sid Feelings, a pop star with a large tween fan base who seeks help from her own repairer of reputations—a mysterious businesswoman who goes by the alias ‘Chalker‘—when the rampage of a mass murderer also called Sid Feelings tarnishes her career. With clever precision, Park shows how a spin doctor like Chalker can thrive by manipulating tools forged by the internet, including doxxing, algorithms, and the online echo chamber—and how horribly things might backfire on clients who don’t obey her rigid instructions. Wong’s striking illustrations and an insightful introduction from Park round things out. Demonstrating how genre classics continue to inform the best modern work, this is a gift for horror fans.” —Publishers Weekly

“A brilliant riff on the Chambers classic and the doomy, creepy now. If we’re all stuck in Carcosa at least we have Ed on our side.” —Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie

“An eerie curio…Park, who’s gifted at assuming various genre forms, delivers an entertainingly pulpy story here, with plenty of dark humor and lurid scenes, while remaining smart about character….An entertaining pair of Lovecraft-ian yarns, past and present.” —Kirkus

“The James Joyce of Korean American literature, and of our times.”
—Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife

“One of the things that I find consistently astonishing about his work is the way that he’s always exploding lines, exploding genre distinctions, creating a really interesting weave . . . Really smart, really playful.”
—Press Play, KCRW

“Ed Park writes books that are easy to love and hard to define. His writing is hilarious but also serious; chaotic while still cohesive; irreverent and earnest all at once.”
—Shelf Awareness (2025 Best Books of the Year)

“Always witty, sometimes surreal, frequently diving beneath mundane surfaces to mysterious and mesmerizing depths.”
—Chicago Review of Books

“I could not stop reading, thinking, and dreaming about Same Bed Different Dreams . . . A feverish, mind-altering marvel of a book.”
—Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Stay True

“To speak of Park’s creativity is also to speak of his humanity—empathy is a function of the imagination, of course, and it makes sense that a mind capable of dreaming these worlds and sisterverses would also be able to endow them with spirits as vivid and complex as our own. It’s dazzling, this steady carousel of delight and stunned awe.”
—Kaveh Akbar, New York Times–bestselling author of Martyr!

“I’ll throw my gauntlet down and say that Ed Park is the funniest prose writer in America.”
—LitHub