The Fathomless Shadows

Is it any surprise that an author’s blog goes dormant, becomes moribund? Not really. I’ll do my best not to treat myself too harshly, though. I have been working, even if the fruits of those labors are not yet ripe.

For about a year, from the fall of 2019 through the fall of 2020, I was doing very well on the writing front. I drafted one novel at the beginning of that stretch and set that project aside to cool (necessarily in that case) while I embarked upon a new feature screenplay and then later in the spring another novel manuscript. It is that second novel that I am still working on now, well into the revision process. For me, this is the slog, even though it’s one that I usually welcome. It’s difficult, but I don’t mind that it is.

When I was writing my dissertation, and I know I’m not alone here, my favorite form of productive procrastination was to format the document repeatedly. Dissertation formatting requirements are notoriously, absurdly strict. At Ohio State in the 2000s, there was an employee in the graduate school who seemed to relish the opportunity to pull out a trusty ruler when a student arrived with her (then required) hardcopy manuscript. She would wield that ruler like a scalpel, looking for the slightest deviation from accepted tolerances. Virtually every late-stage grad student I knew at that time held their breath in those seemingly interminable moments. I did, too, but I was pretty confident that I had done it well enough to pass inspection. That’s how I would waste time in the latter half of the writing process. It slowed things down, but it did have a pay off.

That’s where I am now. I think quarantine fatigue and end-of-democracy fatigue and absurdity fatigue have brought me to the point at which I find it well nigh impossible to concentrate on the elaborate structure of a novel, even though Above and Beyond is not a lengthy novel. I know the kinds of substantive alterations that I need to make at this stage, and yet day after day I find it all but impossible to do them.

So I don’t.

But I don’t do nothing. What I have been doing is the detail work, cleaning up the manuscript I have, remaining familiar with its contours, its shiny bits, and its rougher surfaces. This cleaning up shouldn’t happen now, in the best of circumstances. I should be making the changes that require heavy equipment that beeps when you back it up. I should be knocking down whole wings and hauling away rubble to make room for needed renovations. When all of that is over, it would be the right time for the fine detail work and then the clean up.

And yet, there is something to be said for momentum. I need to keep going, and I especially need to keep the story and the words and the world in my head. Picking it all up again weeks or months after dropping it entirely feels like an insurmountable feat. So, I’m doing whatever I can not to put myself in that position. A new semester is underway, and I am teaching only one class. I have the time to work pretty much every day, and I have the energy. I believe that I can get this manuscript where it needs to be by May. That’s my goal. I’m writing it here so that you and Idris Elba and I can keep me honest.

Last year, Christina and I had the pleasure of being in Portland, OR for the annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhucon (The Only Festival That Understands), where my short script Flypaper won the screenwriting award.

This year, Brian and Gwen Callahan, the current directors of the fest, spun up a virtual version of the festival so that Lurkers everywhere could enjoy the event from the comforts of their homes. I am so impressed and grateful with all of their hard work. This year has taken so much from all of us, and the HPLFF could have been one more of those things. There is a strong and active weird fiction community online, and I know that many of us enjoy those occasional opportunities to meet one another in meatspace, share meals and drinks and stories, and generally get the chance to interact with each other F2F instead of through (but really in addition to) social media.

Before I looked at the fest schedule, I had visions of finally being able to see the entire film lineup. I have lofty goals every time I go to the HPLFF, but there are so many people, places, and things competing for just a handful of days. Brian and Gwen pack the weekend with programming on screen and off, so there is simply no way to do it all in person. However, I thought things might be different with a virtual fest. I’m actually relieved to say that I was completely wrong. I think even if I strapped myself to a chair in front of my computer for the whole weekend, it still wouldn’t have been possible to see every hour of streaming they put online. I haven’t done the math (“You do the math!”), but my sense was that it was simply a losing battle. So, I needed to make some decisions.

My eventual strategy was to watch as many blocks of short films as I could and then add in feature films as I had time. I’m proud to report that I saw every shorts block offered, except for Cthulhu Girl’s Shorts, along with two feature films. My overall impression is that the level of quality was well above the general level that I have seen before at the festival. LOTS more wheat and not much chaff to speak of. Here are some very quick thoughts on a ton of films.

THE RETURN (2020, Dir. Verot, Canada) – An interesting feature that pays as much attention to character development and arcs as it does to the supernatural and VFX. Worth your time.

THE HILL AND THE HOLE (2020, Dir. Darmon and Ernst, USA) – This feature is based on a short story by Fritz Leiber, and it delivers on its premise of rural strangeness with believable characters, lively dialogue, and occasionally jarring visuals. This one did a fine job of building up real dread.

Short Films I Enjoyed Immensely (the best of the best of the films I enjoyed):
Oak – iPhone-shot quarantine film; disturbing and deeply weird
Secluse – stop-motion wonder from Monsieur Soeur
Exit – fantastic Russian film with serious House of Leaves mojo
Magic Hour – fabulous Tokyo-set film
Smiles – Spanish film that is profoundly funny and disturbing at the same time
Clearwater – excellent VFX carry this well-done set piece
Bad Seed – hardscrabble, agrarian weirdness
We Said Forever – you should dread marriage counseling
Circle of Stone – slickly produced genre-bending tale
PHX – a deft twist on a classic supernatural scenario
The Instrument – a soul-quaking dreadfest ripped right out of a Delta Green op
Exist! – peerless Belgian surrealism
The Appointment – peerless British surrealism
The Black Tome of Alsophocus – awesome Argentinian short that goes from interesting visuals into fantastic graphic novel animation

Every year at the HPLFF, there is a 72-Hour Lovecraft Under the Gun filmmaking competition. Teams enter and are given a prop and a line of dialogue that must both be in the film and then 72 hours to write, shoot, edit, score, and deliver their short film. These are always great fun to see, and believe it or not, it is quite often the animated films that blow me away the most. There is a team that does stop-motion animation (in 3 days!!!) pretty much every year. But this year it was a fantastic musical short using cardboard cut-out puppets that knocked me out and made me smile for hours. If you ever get the chance, check out The Infernal Teahouse.

Those who follow me on Facebook especially will know that I spent the last few weeks pushing the Word Horde StoryBundle horror bundle curated by Molly Tanzer in support of Planned Parenthood. I was very excited to be asked to be involved, and it seems to have been a smashing success. “We” sold hundreds of bundles, the vast majority of which were the $15 bonus bundles that include Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows and fourteen other awesome books from Word Horde. That’s not only a nice royalty check for me, but it’s also a nice donation to a tried and true provider of reproductive health services. Even if you missed out on the StoryBundle, I encourage you to head on over to Word Horde and see what’s on offer.

Thank you, all!

This is an amazing opportunity for all of you out there who are fans of reading horror and the weird, in particular if you like to check out the cutting edge of indie-authored fiction. This month’s horror StoryBundle features most of the Word Horde line up, and as you see above that includes Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows, along with over a dozen other astounding titles.

Here’s how StoryBundle works. You decide how much you want to pay. For at least $5, you get the Basic Bundle in any ebook format:

Corpsepaint by David Peak
A Sick Gray Laugh by Nicole Cushing
A Hawk in the Woods by Carrie Laben
The Fisherman by John Langan
She Said Destroy by Nadia Bulkin

If you pay at least $15, then in addition to the Basic Bundle you get the other ten Bonus Books (15 books for $15+), which includes yours truly:

Beneath by Kristi DeMeester
An Augmented Fourth by Tony McMillen
Memento Mori – The Fathomless Shadows by Brian Hauser
Stonefish by Scott R. Jones
Furnace by Livia Llewellyn
Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales by Orrin Grey
The Human Alchemy by Michael Griffin
The Raven’s Table by Christine Morgan
The Unnamed Country by Jeffrey Thomas
Vermilion by Molly Tanzer

I’ve personally read 60% of these titles, and I will vouch for every one of them being worth your time and your eyeballs. I cannot wait to read the rest of them myself. This is a marvelous opportunity for you to sweep up a treasure trove of indie horror fiction for a song.

Don’t miss out, because the StoryBundle will only be available for a limited time!

Tabletop role-playing games made me who I am.

I can say that as surely as I can say it about my family, our socio-economic bracket, and my DNA. Later on, my identity would be shaped strongly by what I read and what I watched. But from age 5 on, role-playing games were at the core of my cultural experience. They formed the bulk of my reading outside of schoolwork, and they dominated how I spent my free time.

Like a lot of folks, Dungeons and Dragons was the game where I got my start. My brother (four years older) got the D&D Basic Set at the tale end of the 1970s. I was occasionally allowed to play, and in a couple of years I was also allowed to look at the slim Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks that he collected. But the D&D books were never mine. I bought one or two supplements later on, but the core books and the vast majority of our adventure modules belonged to Kurt.

But it didn’t take me long to discover other games, always in different genres. I started to frequent the role-playing game section of toy stores just as much as the other sections and eventually more. And then sometime in the mid-1980s, I discovered Mind Games, at the time the only game store in Toledo, OH. During the early- to mid-80s I purchased all sorts of different games: Chill, Call of Cthulhu, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Tunnels and Trolls, Crime Fighter, Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic, Pendragon, GURPS, Top Secret, Car Wars, and near the end of high school, Star Wars and Space: 1889. About half of these games remained on my shelves (who am I kidding, strewn haphazardly around my bedroom), read but unplayed. I wanted to play them, but I was not good at convincing my friends to play them. But we did play hours and hours, years and years of Chill, Tunnels and Trolls, and Stalking. And, of course, D&D.

Just the other day, I was diving down an internet rabbit hole when I discovered a site dedicated to collecting scans of out-of-print tabletop RPGs. I’m ambivalent about these sorts of sites. Part of me respects the archival nature of the collections, and I obviously got a powerful jolt of nostalgia when I perused it. And part of me is shocked at all of the “free” content that is still protected by copyright. I won’t link to it here, but it’s out there.

One of the things that it made me confront and ponder is the way that I have been a completist about certain things and what that means for me. For instance, I have the complete line of material produced for the first edition of Chill put out by Pacesetter Limited in the early 1980s. I am fairly certain I have everything made for the James Bond RPG, as well. I remember this vividly. When I found Chill, I found something that brought together disparate interests. By that time, I already had a strong affinity for macabre tales, and I was an avid gamer. Here was a horror RPG that seemed completely different from TSR’s D&D. I owned Call of Cthulhu, but Chill flipped more switches for me than the Lovecraft-based game did. Who knows why? Maybe it was the graphic design. Maybe it was just the world the designers created. I usually made at least a weekly visit to the toy store and later to Mind Games. Whenever there was a new Chill supplement, I bought it, or it was the next thing I bought when I had enough money. I wanted everything they produced. Anyway, looking back now, it’s almost unbelievable that Pacesetter introduced Chill in 1984, and they ceased company operations by 1986. The ripples they created spread for years after that.

When I found this trove of online scans, of course I fantasized about finally getting to play some of them. Even before the current pandemic, I had found my way back to the early relationships, gaming online with some of my childhood friends, my partner, and some new friends. Roll20 has allowed us all to connect in a way that feels vital and necessary. It has also allowed me to tick off some boxes. I played through a full D&D5e campaign, I ran a full Delta Green campaign, and I’m trying out a brand new game. But even so, I felt this greed to try out old games in a new format. Maybe I could find people to play Space: 1889. Maybe someone would want to play through those old Chill scenarios, too. Maybe I could, and maybe they would. But that really is just pure nostalgia. The connection with others that comes while playing these games is sufficient (not really necessary), but it’s not at all necessary for me to go back and finally get to play these games. Would it be fun? Probably. But it also feels indulgent.

I’m ecstatic to have reconnected with old gaming buddies and added new people to that circle. We have already created new and exciting adventures together. I’m heartened to see so many of my friends online doing the same around the world. Maybe I will play some of those old games again some day, but I’m not worried about it anymore. It doesn’t feel like a missed opportunity. It feels more like the reason I have some of the opportunities I have today. I think it’s safe to say that I pursued fiction writing because of all the different games I found it difficult to play for one reason or another. My first feature-length screenplay was a straight adaptation of Space: 1889. If I couldn’t tell these stories with my friends, then maybe I could tell them to my friends. And now to people I don’t even know.

Well, take to the inflatable pool, anyway. This is central Pennsylvania, after all, and much as we might want to, we’re not going anywhere.

Christina and I planned a late-summer staycation so that we could try to get some kind of non-work downtime prior to the start of whatever the fall semester turns out to be. I won’t be in a classroom this fall, but she will be (assuming there isn’t another complete lockdown), and of course the stress around that fact has educators across the country feeling anxious. At the same time, the looming threat of economic precariousness has prompted me to once again look for a more secure day job. I’m focusing my efforts on becoming a faceless bureaucrat, particularly if the position is telework eligible.

While Christina had a whole pallet of projects that she wanted to complete before this weekend, I had only one: the first draft of a new novel called Above and Beyond. This is a novel I’ve been wanting to do for a few years. Its origin is a feature-length script I wrote for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival screenwriting competition in 2013. That script had lots of cool things, but also some pretty serious flaws. After that competition, I hit upon a way to transform the story into something that would work much, much better than the story I had already told. Just like with The Hermit, I set myself a goal of three chapters a week, stuck to it, and completed the initial draft in about six and a half weeks.

I don’t want to give away too much about it, but I will say that it’s a weird noir set during World War II. I think of it as Val Lewton doing cosmic horror for the Office of War Information.

I’m very excited to read through the manuscript and plan out the revision, but I am also eager for the rest and relaxation. The book will be waiting for me when our staycation is over. Waiting, and watching.

Our plan for staycation involves a great deal of pleasure reading and the completion of a 1000-piece puzzle (I bought it especially for Christina; I can’t wait for her to see it!).

We’ll maintain our weekly socializing, including a Science and Sorcery reading group (we’re reading through Cassilda’s Song two stories at a time) and a new Roll20 campaign of Scum and Villainy. But other than that, there will be no work.* We’ll continue to run and to make cool food, and—checks notes—we’ll be instituting vacation rules with regard to beverages.

There are some cool things coming up in the next couple of months. The Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater Weird will be virtual this year, and I will be moderating two different events. And then in September I’m probably going to be a guest on a fabulous podcast in September at the same time that cool new things will be happening for Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows. Stay tuned!

I hope you’re all doing as well as you can be during all of this. Stay strong, take care of yourselves, and look after your crew.

* There may be a little work, but it’s the kind we have written actual signed contracts to ourselves about so that it doesn’t cascade into betrayals of the staycation credo.

When we moved to central Pennsylvania last summer, there was a spare bedroom that we identified as my office. The whole house needed a fairly serious cosmetic make over, and I can’t tell you how excited I was to basically imagine my work space from the ground up.

I know not everyone likes this green, or how much of it there is, but I love it. I feel comfortable surrounded by it. I worked like this for months, surrounded by stacked boxes, and having to shoo away one of our cats who wanted nothing more than to mark this room as hers.

The new green paint was there on the walls to encourage me to think about how the office would and could look, as soon as I got off my ass and did something about it. But, man, moving is exhausting in all sorts of different ways. But when I finally got around to transforming this room, I was so excited to see it come together.

After months of various home improvement tasks, it was time to lay down new floors in my office and a couple other rooms. I had only done this sort of thing once before in a small hallway, but I think they turned out pretty nice. Way WAY better than the previous low-pile, deep padded, heavily trafficked carpet.

Here is all the furniture except for the bookshelves. The green is comforting to me, but the books…oh, the books.

This is the lived-in version with books, and rug, and various tid bits that have yet to find permanent homes.

The long Ikea desk is the centerpiece in terms of furniture. Being able to have a permanent typing desk right next to my iMac workstation is just heaven. I know it’s a portable typewriter, but working at the dining room table was a bit of a hassle for everyone involved. And for those of you wondering, that typewriter is not for show. I have written three book-length manuscripts on it. The printer also has a document feed scanner, so I can type for a day, scan the pages, and have both a PDF and a text file in minutes.

This print hangs right above my reading chair. I can’t begin to tell you how much joy this print brings me. It’s a brilliant piece of art that pays tribute to another brilliant piece of art.

It’s been almost a year, and the office is finally complete. In my experience, that is faster than I have ever been able to effectively organize and decorate a work space. I have already done plenty of work of which I am very proud in this room: a new novel draft, a short screenplay, a feature, a couple more treatments. I’m eager for the projects yet to come, too.

I already need more shelves, though…

At the beginning of the COVID-19 quarantine, I saw a lot of sites commenting on pandemic films like Outbreak (1995) and Contagion (2011). In general, I would say that I am the kind of person who does not rush to films like these when real life is giving filmmakers notes. I am not knocking the impulse at all, I want to be clear. We all react in different ways at different times, and our film viewing serves different purposes. For instance, not everyone who enjoys horror films seeks them out for the same reasons (forever complicating those periodic essays on “Why Horror?”). Some folks are seeking rollercoaster thrills, some folks are habituating themselves to the idea of death and worst-case scenarios, some folks have an affinity to certain moods or themes or aesthetics that are commonly found in films grouped as horror, and the list of reasons goes on. I am simply not in the camp of people who rush to watch pandemic films in the middle of an actual pandemic.

I have been watching horror films, though, when I can. A lot of these are re-watches, dipping back into classics like Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and In the Mouth of Madness (1994) in order to jump start some thought processes and lubricate some gears, etc. In a lot of ways, these films are part of work, as enjoyable and wonderful and brilliant as they are.

And I guess that brings me to the question of art vs. entertainment. I’m not always interested in catering to that dichotomy. There are plenty of films that we might call artistic that I also find highly entertaining. The categories are certainly not exclusive.

But I think, in general, that my definition of entertainment includes some sense in which the object under discussion is not designed to make me uncomfortable. Laugh, cry, scream, yes. But it is not designed to upset me. Perhaps it is a singularly beautiful or astounding example of a genre, or more likely a tweak of a genre. Something that offers us the opportunity to see life or stories or ourselves in a new way. These examples of art are both beautiful and relatively safe.

But there is also the art that is designed to shake you, art that is made to upset the way you see the world, and it’s not interested in adding in a teaspoon of sugar. This art is challenging, and I’m definitely still up for that kind of challenge. That’s the kind of aesthetic experience that I want to have more of and not less. It’s not what I want all the time–sometimes I just want the popcorn–but I like to have those aesthetic experiences, even when they make me uncomfortable.

In that spirit, a couple of weeks after the quarantine began, Christina agreed that we would finally work our way through the two Criterion Collection boxed sets that we own. One is of Éric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales,” and the other is “Five Films” by John Cassavetes. When I announced this on Facebook, at least one person jokingly (?) warned us against a married couple watching these films together during such a psychologically stressful situation. I suppose it does have the ring of a clinical experiment about it.

Well, to the best of my knowledge, our marriage has survived this experiment intact. (Christina, feel free to chime in.) Was it difficult? Hell yes, it was difficult. Christina and I were both surprised to remember that we had only ever seen Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud (1969) and Pauline à la plage (1983), the latter not being part of the “Six Moral Tales,” but rather the later “Comedies and Proverbs” series. Maud remains an engaging masterpiece, and we recall Pauline pretty fondly, too.

However, it turns out that the mid-century masculinity on display in the rest of the moral tales is not all that commendable. For those who haven’t seen them, the moral tales each follow a man who enters into or manufactures a situation in which they make a moral choice. That choice almost always has to do with whether or not to be faithful, either to an actual romantic commitment or to the idea of one (or to a related philosophical ideal). These films are intriguing human studies, and it’s also fascinating to watch French films from the 1960s and 1970s in their own right, but some of those humans can be difficult to stomach.

The real challenge came during the two weeks it took us to make it through the “Five Films” set of John Cassavetes’s films. Again, Christina and I had both seen Shadows (1959) before, and we both liked it a lot. It’s a tremendously rough film, but its energy and its milieu and its performances are so extraordinary that those rough edges become an inextricable part of the essence of the film. They don’t detract at all.

After Shadows, the films look ever-more professional, and the stories are more and more gut-wrenching. It’s a litany of trapped people treating other people horribly. Every one of the films is full of fantastic acting. A couple of them have genuinely funny moments (Opening Night in particular). And yet, the recurring motif is human calamity, intimate and domestic. There is no need for war or natural disaster here. Flawed people manage to evoke their very own crises, thank you very much. Individuals let other individuals down, and only very occasionally they don’t.

I think that’s where the line is for me at the moment. I understand how much collective action means right now in the real world. So often in apocalypse films, people band together and help each other until someone does something stupid or selfish, and then it all goes to shit. But these films are about the ways in which we are routinely stupid and selfish and hurtful, even or especially when we are French and know a lot of philosophy. I guess it’s just that this sort of human failure has only local effects, or it seems to (though it is usually also reflective of while also contributing to systemic ills). In the middle of a pandemic, I am forced to think at all times about the ways in which my mistakes and the mistakes of others, willful or otherwise, might have dire consequences. By comparison, Rohmer and Cassavetes seem quaint.