The Red King is a character who appears in Lewis Carroll's 1871 fantasy novel Through the Looking-Glass.

During this time, Tweedledum and Tweedledee state that she is part of the Red King's dream and she will "go out—bang!—like a candle" when he wakes.

The match ends by Alice's checkmating of the king, an action coincident with the taking of the Red Queen.

In the final chapter of the book, Alice acknowledges that the Red King had, after all, been asleep throughout the whole game, and is left wondering whether the whole experience was her dream or his.

Due to his inactivity, some authors, such as Martin Gardner in The Annotated Alice, have speculated that if Carroll intended to portray the red side of the chess-game as being representative of the negative sides of human nature, then the vice he had in mind for the Red King was idleness.