Month: May 2019

The Real Acknowledgments for Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows

The Acknowledgments at the end of Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows are true, in the sense that they are true to the story, but they are not real. They are diegetic acknowledgments; they live within the fiction. Now that the book is out there in the world, I want to publish the actual Acknowledgments to calm my conscience and recognize the support of some amazing people.

This book would not have happened without Wes Craven, Ken Lyon, John Heneage, and Adam Paul. Adam founded the St. Lawrence International Film Festival in 2015 to bring some more cinematic culture to the St. Lawrence Valley. He approached me, as a film studies professor at Clarkson University, about hosting a screening of Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). In the late 1960s, Craven taught in my department after completing his masters at Johns Hopkins. It was there that Wes helped Ken and John make a 45-minute student film titled Pandora Experimentia with his own 16mm movie camera. This is the film that convinced Wes that he wanted to make movies professionally. The research I did into amateur/underground film, Wes Craven, and Potsdam, NY in the late-1960s (a lot of it fueled by long conversations with Ken) became the basis for the story that would grow into Memento Mori.

I’m very thankful to a wealth of friends who helped me hash out some of my ideas and who were willing to listen to elevator pitches and give me their feedback. Many thanks to Andy Vogel, Christen Taylor, Doug Swarts, Steven Stannish, Stephen Casper, Karen Buckle, Mariko McDonald, Elizabeth Smith, Felicity Palmer, Michael Goldenberg, Katie Comer, and Chris Lindemann.

I’m at the very least indirectly indebted to many currently working authors who deign to live some of their writerly lives on social media. Among these are Caitlín Kiernan, Laird Barron, Scott Nicolay, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Joseph S. Pulver Sr., Michael Griffin, Gemma Files, John Langan, Nick Mamatas, Molly Tanzer, Nathan Ballingrud, Nadia Bulkin, Chuck Wendig, and Jeff VanderMeer. Their presence in my digital life has been a continual source of advice, inspiration, and example. Though the words were rarely if ever directed at me, I was listening, and I am grateful.

Alongside social media, the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon has been a creative touchstone for me since the first year I attended in 2003. Thanks here go out to the examples and inspirations of Andrew Migliore, Brian Callahan, Gwen Callahan, Aaron Vanek, and Adam Scott Glancy, who are so integral to my memories and experience of the HPLFF. This is also where I met Ross E. Lockhart of Word Horde in 2017, who took a chance on this book and guided it into the world. Thank you, Ross.

I’m grateful every day for my family: Russ and Patti, who taught me the value of books early on; Kurt, who is one of the most continually inspiring people I know; and Ellen, the best retired librarian/mother-in-law a man could ask for. I also share my writing space every day with tiny ninjas in furry suits. Over the course of this project–from notes to galley proofs–Random, Nibbler, and Madeleine Albright have each made their opinions known and reminded me of what is truly important (i.e., their food).

My most profound gratitude is reserved for Christina Xydias, my partner and sharer of ice cream. You make everything better.

“You’re gonna get some hop-ons.”

Happy Memorial Day.

This is the day that I share a quiet toast with my partner, Christina, “to our brothers and sisters who’ve gone before us.” I am fortunate to be a veteran who is not surrounded by the ghosts of friends in uniform. Nevertheless, it remains important to me to make the time to acknowledge this day thoughtfully.

Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows officially drops tomorrow. This day has been long in coming, and I’m excited to be able to share this story with you. The initial round of print pre-orders went out last week, and I’ve received reports of them arriving in mailboxes as early as last Thursday. I hope you all enjoy it!

Kevin Ross design for The Yellow Sign (1989)

As promised, I’ll be using this space to introduce you to some of the background research and influences that went into Memento Mori. Today, I want to say a few things about The King in Yellow.

The King in Yellow is really a couple of different things. Let’s start with the fiction and work our way out toward (some kind of) reality. In Memento Mori, and in many stories by different authors over more than a hundred years, The King in Yellow is an infamous two-act play that usually appears in book form. Those who read the cursed play are doomed to succumb to an irreversible madness. They become haunted by the romantic Gothic figures of Camilla and Cassilda from the nightmare streets of Carcosa on the shores of the Lake of Hali. Their lives are invaded by the Tattered King, the Pallid Mask, and the Yellow Sign. The horrors in this world tend more toward the surreal and existentially grotesque than toward the monstrous and bloody. 

In Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows, this cursed play shows up as part of the story. Various characters have copies of it, and its malignant influence seeps throughout the book. In addition, the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask, and the king itself make appearances.

The play The King in Yellow comes from an 1895 collection of short stories by the American author Robert W. Chambers. This story collection is also called The King in Yellow, even though the play figures explicitly in only a small handful of the stories in that volume. Chambers is considered by many authors, critics, and readers more broadly to be one of the pillars of supernatural horror fiction, despite the fact that this reputation rests primarily on this small portion of only one of his many works of fiction. For his fans, however, these few stories are powerfully evocative.

One indication of how powerful these stories are is the number of genre authors who have extended their influence in new and different stories. In fact, Chambers himself found partial inspiration for The King in Yellow in Ambrose Bierce’s short stories “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” and “Haïta the Shepherd,” from which he takes the names Carcosa, Hali, and Hastur. Possibly the strongest boost to the afterlife of Chambers’s creation came from H.P. Lovecraft, who praised The King in Yellow in his own treatise Supernatural Horror in Literature. Lovecraft’s extended essay winds up exerting an enormous influence on the continuing visibility of the authors he praised, including Robert Chambers, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft also used story elements from Chambers’s weird tales in several of his own stories and poems, effectively bringing these elements into what later becomes known as the Cthulhu mythos. This move is later strengthened by other authors more or less self-consciously writing from within that mythos, including August Derleth, Lin Carter, Charles Stross, Karl Edward Wagner, Alan Moore, and more (like me).

There are two more recent players in this chain of influence that deserve special mention. The first is Joseph S. Pulver Sr. He is the writer who, more than I think any other, has taken up the tattered mantle of The King in Yellow and made it his own. Far from engaging in pastiche, Joe’s stories and poems gather together inspiration from Chambers and others and then unleashes them in wholly new milieus and environments. His work as both author and editor has breathed new vitality into this corner of weird fiction.

True Detective (HBO, 2014)

Finally, I think I have to mention True Detective. Like many people who count themselves as at least occasional or tangential fans of Chambers’s weird fiction, I was tantalized by the hints at links to The King in Yellow sprinkled through the first season of HBO’s True Detective. Series creator Nic Pizzolatto has been up front about the influence (and has explicitly recommended Pulver’s work to fans). For many of these fans, that first season comes off as something of a disappointment in terms of its potential as weird fiction. Personally, I found it satisfyingly atmospheric and a worthy addition to a swirling cauldron of art that references these characters, places, and tropes in different ways.

There is your mini-primer to Robert W. Chambers and The King in Yellow. You’ll find a list of links below for further reading/viewing.

Christophe Thill’s Introduction to The King in Yellow at the Internet Archive (for a more detailed overview of the story elements and sources)

Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895) at Project Gutenberg

H.P. Lovecraft on Chambers in Supernatural Horror in Literature (Chapter VIII, paragraphs 17 & 18, 1927)

A selection of relevant works written or edited by Joseph S. Pulver Sr.:

Season in Carcosa (2012)
Cassilda’s Song (new KiY tales written by women, 2015)
The King in Yellow Tales, Vol. 1 (2015)

“Baby, you got a stew going!”

Signing author book plates.

We’re one week away from the official launch of Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows. I understand from Ross E. Lockhart of Word Horde, as well as from friends, that pre-ordered ebooks were delivered over the weekend, and pre-ordered paperbacks were shipped yesterday. Those of you who ordered from Word Horde should have your books soon, complete with hand-signed book plates!

It’s hard to describe just how exciting this time is. It’s an in-held breath, anticipating reader reactions. Initial reviews have been favorable, and that helps to make this a pleasing kind of excitement. I know that there are people out there (complete strangers!) who have already enjoyed the book. At the same time, I’ve been teaching long enough to know that not everyone will like a thing. Doesn’t matter what it is. So, I’m ready for some folks not to connect with it, too.

Once the book is officially launched, I’m going to start posting some blogs about the research I did for Memento Mori. I’ll do one on a handful of the North Country locations that inspired scenes in the novel, one on the Soviet Super 8 movie camera that Tina uses for her films, one on Riot Grrrl zines, and probably another one on underground film. I won’t inundate you; I’ll space them out. They’ll come with a host of links if you find yourself intrigued by some topic and feel like diving down a rabbit hole in search of a tea party.

Let me know when you get your copies. I’d love to see pics of the book in your hands, out there in the wild.