Last week I had the pleasure and good fortune to be interviewed by Anya Martin for The Outer Dark podcast. The Outer Dark is one of the best places to find great conversations about what is going on with the contemporary weird from the widest possible array of voices. Anta and her co-conspirator Scott Nicolay also organize the annual Outer Dark Symposium of the Greater Weird where weird artists and fans can gather face-to-face for readings and panels and meals and mind melding. I attended the San Jose symposium in 2018, and I am on the program for the next one that takes place this March in Atlanta.
The interview with me appears on Episode 064 of the podcast, which begins with some updates about the preparation for the symposium, as well as Gordon White’s insightful reviews of two new works in the field of the weird. The description on the Outer Dark page will give you some idea of just how rollicking and far-ranging our discussion was. I hope you enjoy!
It’s been a while since I shared anything with you, and for that I apologize! Things have been happening, but we all know how it can be during the holidays. Some of you may even remember that the major impetus for my sprint to complete the initial draft of my second novel was that I was set to begin a day job in mid-November, so that has been keeping me busy, as well. I wanted to pop out of winter obscurity to share a couple of things with you.
The cover of Final Grrrl #5 as envisioned by J Owen Schultz and his daughter, Peyton.
The first is a simply astounding piece of fan art. One of my “longest-serving friends,” J Owen Schultz, created this complete hard copy edition of Final Grrrl #5 from Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows. J enlisted the help of his daughter Peyton in completing a lot of the art that you can find within.
I would have loved if the published version of Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows had a fully graphic rendering of Billie Jacobs’s zine as well as a facsimile copy of Tina’s letter to C.C. at the end. I think that kind of design would enhance the reader’s experience. But it might be even better to have these versions coming from readers of the novel instead.
Just look at the care and creativity here!
This is just a sample, of course. You’ll have to forgive me, but I’m hoarding the rest for myself.
I’m excited to report that I just completed an interview with Anya Martin and The Outer Dark podcast (this is a link to the entire series; my interview will be up in a couple of days), and I will be sure to post it here and elsewhere when it is available. If you haven’t already looked into the Outer Dark, and you like weird fiction, I highly recommend that you dive in. They host discussions on the cutting edge of the contemporary weird. I attended their second symposium in San Jose in 2018, and I am on the program for this spring’s iteration in Atlanta.
I’ll also be posting soon about my new writing space. When we moved to central PA this summer, Christina and I both had the opportunity to carve out new spaces in which to work at home. Mine is very nearly complete, and I want to show it to you, mostly because I’m very proud of it. It’s already been the site of some very satisfying work, and I can’t wait for more.
I have no doubt that authors have different wishes for their work, and that sometimes they have different wishes depending on the work. Maybe for the first (solid) book, you just want it published. Maybe you’re looking for fame and fortune (“and everything that goes with it…”). Maybe these three sort of go without saying.
I had one more or less secret wish for Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows: I hoped that it would move some readers to make art. It’s a novel about the power of art to influence the audience and also the power of art to inspire other artists. So, whether it was fan art, fanfic, or something else entirely, it didn’t matter.
Well, here we are.
My brother, Kurt Hauser (KFH, if you’re nasty), has gifted us with a gritty, thoroughly punk rendition of Lethal Chamber’s “Past the Fates,” the lyrics to which Billie Jacobs lovingly copies into her zine, Final Grrrl #5.
Crank it!
Lethal Chamber, “Past the Fates”
Right?!
I can smell the beer and sweat and smoke now.
More to come!!! In the meantime, let me know what you think of this one.
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)
