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.
The sign says “Author Signing Today.” The woman says, “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Last Wednesday was my first public reading from Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows. It was held at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, California and hosted by Ross Lockhart, my publisher at Word Horde. I’ve done a lot of “readings” before in the form of academic conferences, so you might say that I have a particular set of skills. And yet, it’s different when you’re reading from your own novel, or reading your own poetry.
This reading came together fortuitously, because my partner and I were vacationing nearby with a couple of our friends. The four of us showed up at the book store after a nice dinner in Petaluma and were immediately greeted by Ross and shown around the store. I grew up with a mix of corporate (B. Dalton and Waldenbooks) and independent booksellers (Thackeray’s in Toledo, OH), and my heart has always been with the independents. Copperfield’s is obviously the kind of place that can engender that kind of love and loyalty. I would proudly shop there regularly, if we lived nearby. If you get a chance to stop in, I would highly recommend making sure you head into the basement (Copperfield’s Underground) for the used and rare book experience.
Right at 7:00pm, we gathered at the back of the shop, which was already set up with podium and table for the book signing that would come after. A few people were already seated, and a few more came and filled in seats as Ross introduced me and then I stepped up to the mic.
And it went well! Of course, I had hemmed and hawed for a while about what to read. A reading like this shoots for 10-15 minutes, which is maybe six or seven pages of this book. That makes it tricky. I chose an early scene from C.C. Waite’s memoir of Tina Mori, which only required a minimum of exposition to set up. I was sort of surprised that the piece read so well, but the audience was there for it and reacted just as I hoped they would.
I love that in this photo it looks like my glasses are fake costume specs.
The Q&A afterward was lively and interesting. It was a mix of people who had read the novel and those who had not, so we all did our best not to get into the weeds or spoil anything. Luckily, some great questions allowed me the opportunity to get philosophical and talk about the weird and the numinous and the symphony of horror and Robert W. Chambers. I was a happy author!
My tongue sticks out when I sign books.
The book signing portion was a bit mind-boggling, honestly. It was a wonderful out of body experience that was simultaneously terrifying and glorious. Those excellent questions kept coming from the very thoughtful listeners and readers who had come that evening.
Dillon Beach, not far from Bodega Bay where Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) is set.
As I said, we were out there primarily because we were on vacation, so let me share the Alfred Hitchcock double feature section of our vacation from a couple days after the reading. First, we drove to Point Reyes Station and then headed up the coast to Bodega Bay, where The Birds takes place. We didn’t stop, but we did get out a little further on at Dillon Beach. There were actually more people on the sand that day than this photo seems to indicate, and the birds were not at all aggressive. Yet.
I don’t actually know what the hell is going on with this photo. I assume David Lynch is to blame.
From Dillon Beach, we pressed on to the Armstrong Redwood Forest (reminiscent of the redwood scene from Vertigo), where I took this picture. I honestly don’t even know what’s going on here, but I love it and don’t feel a need to question it too closely. We made it out of the forest and eventually made it home to Lewisburg. Or did we?
Now that we’re home, we’re able to take advantage of a real treat here in Lewisburg. In the summers, the gorgeously restored art deco Campus Theater runs a free Hitchcock program. Tonight is Psycho, and you can bet we’ll be there.
I have something amazing to share with you, but it has to wait just a little bit longer. I know, I probably shouldn’t tease you like this. I can’t help it, though. You’ll see another post in a couple of days, and I guarantee you it will be worth the wait…
Memento Mori is a book I would not have written if we had not moved to Potsdam, New York in 2012. As I wrote in the real acknowledgments for the novel, the story came partially as a result of delving into Wes Craven’s history in Potsdam while he taught at Clarkson College of Technology, before he became a filmmaker. But it’s also true that the geography and architecture of the North Country were key to the development of the novel.
Many, many locations from the North Country found their way into Tina Mori’s tale. Potsdam became Red Stone, a reference to the Potsdam red sandstone that, along with timber, drove the early economy of the town. I want to share with you the inspirations for some of the locations in the novel. If you’ve read the book, I’m sure you have images of these places in your head, and I don’t want to displace those at all, so I hope you’ll take these in the spirit they are intended.
Bayside Cemetery Gatehouse
The impressive cemetery gatehouse where Tina and C.C. go to meet with Dr. Holly is actually the Bayside Cemetery gatehouse in Potsdam. It was built in 1901 entirely of local red sandstone from a design by Edgar Josselyn and currently is listed on the National Historic Register. I fell in love with this building the moment I saw it. Not long after we moved to town, Clarkson University took over a long-term lease of the building and started casting about for possible uses. I wanted very much for it to be used as housing for an artist-in-residence program, but admittedly this isn’t really Clarkson’s bag (it’s a well-regarded STEM school). The small rounded door to the right of the photo is the door through which Tina and C.C. enter the house.
Fort Montgomery on Lake Champlain
The North Country has a lot of great places to visit, as long as you don’t mind road trips (90 minutes to Lake Placid, 90 minutes to Ottawa, two hours to Montreal, about three hours to Burlington, VT). On our way to Burlington, the bridge between New York and Vermont over Lake Champlain at Rouses Point sports a view of the early Federal fortification of Ft. Montgomery (or Fort Blunder) north of the bridge on the western shore. This is the fort where Tina and C.C. witness the ritual that becomes so key to the overall story. The fort is currently private property (it’s for sale, if you’re interested), so I haven’t been in it, and I think that actually adds to its mystique for me.
A North Country Barn
Tina Mori’s arc in the novel is bookended by two barn parties. At the first, she sees several films by Maya Deren that convince her that what she really wants to do is direct. The second, in the same barn, is where she premieres her masterpiece, The Dragon’s Teeth. The North Country is dotted with barns in various states of repair and use. You’ll find collapsed barns, rugged old barns mostly in use for occasional storage, and brand new barns (usually Amish) being put to their full range of uses. Barn parties are still a thing in St.Lawrence County, whether for weddings or Halloween parties or whatever. I got the idea for it in the novel from the party that was thrown after the successful screenings of the student film that Wes Craven helped to make at Clarkson in 1968. This isn’t that barn, but you get the idea.
Additionally, one of my astute readers has pointed out to me what he thought were fictional references to the Java Barn, a local music venue on the campus of St. Lawrence University. Though the echoes seem to be spot on, I had to admit that I had never heard of the Java Barn prior to him mentioning it. Synchronicity.
Barnum Pond
One of Tina’s films, The Stairs, takes place at Barnum Pond in the Adirondack Park, not far from Saranac Lake. Barnum pond is one of those pristinely gorgeous spots that came to characterize the Adirondacks for me. As you take a wide curve in NY State Route 30, the trees fall away and this lovely pond stretches away toward two low peaks beyond the western shore.
The Dilly Wagon
This last location is more of an inspiration. It doesn’t show up in a thinly veiled way, like these other locations. The Dilly Wagon was an early-1960s drive-in restaurant that was the creation of Charles Weinstein of Potsdam. The restaurant had two things that set it apart: its signature Dilly Sauce and its Conestoga wagon design. When I stumbled across this bit of Potsdam historical lore, it stuck with me. I have a soft spot for diners and drive-ins and these post-war hold-overs. However, instead of going with the wagon, I chose to create the Barnstormers aviation-themed restaurant where Tina gets a part-time job. It’s the same general idea, a gimmicky greasy spoon, though Barnstormers is an eat-in roadhouse.
Those are some of the locations in the novel inspired by real-life spots in Northern New York. Were they a whole lot different than you imagined them to be?
A big part of Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows is issue #5 of the zine Final Grrrl created by Billie Jacobs. As I’ve written elsewhere, Billie’s voice in the zine is in many ways the farthest from my own, and so it was the one for which I had to do the most research. I want to share with you a little bit about what I found when I set about fleshing out Billie’s background.
Billie’s passion is horror movies. That’s what fills her thoughts most of the time. When her imagination or her creativity is sparked, it’s usually in relation to horror. That desire for thrills and chills is what fuels her reactor’s core. It provides energy, but it doesn’t entirely translate into identity.
As more and more people around her expected her to fit in somewhere, whether or not they had specific ideas about where, Billie resisted most of the conventional cliques. They didn’t want her and she didn’t see herself with them, even though she felt a desire to belong somewhere. She finally found what she was looking for when she came across a copy of someone else’s Riot Grrrl zine at her uncle’s copy shop.
Riot Grrrl is a musical movement rooted in punk aesthetics and driven by feminism. It began in the Pacific Northwest and in Washington, D.C. when young women began forming bands that would allow them to perform and express themselves in ways that they had seen young men doing . Many of them had been going to punk shows for years, but they didn’t feel like they belonged. They often found themselves relegated to the back of the venue. As Riot Grrrl started to build momentum, bands like Bikini Kill would often announce from the stage, “Girls to the front,” emphasizing that their shows were places where women were fully empowered to rock out.
More than a type of music, Riot Grrrl also encompassed a vital streak of political activism that focused on feminism and especially on protecting girls and women from abuse, but it quickly grew to include additional concerns like racism, homophobia, and ableism. Some of this growth was a reflection of the diverse interests of the women who made up the movement, while other aspects of it only grew after some members pointed out the shortcomings of the movement. For example, Riot Grrrl’s message and image were resoundingly straight and white at first, and it took some time for those who were viewed as leaders to recognize how that messaging could exclude some people who wanted to contribute. All of this activism was carried out in the form of loosely organized chapters where members could meet up for mutual support and planning, but more crucially it took place through the mail in the form of zines.
My go-to sources for Riot Grrrl history and aesthetics were two books and a documentary (in addition to a lot of listening to songs by Riot Grrrl bands and reading lyrics).
The Riot Grrrl Collection is a fantastically designed full-color collection of zine material, posters, and other printed ephemera from the movement’s heyday. This book gave me a crystal clear picture of the kinds of things that Billie would have been reading after she sent her $1 off in the mail to get a back issue of Girl Germs or the latest copy of Bikini Kill. It also comes with a fascinating introductory essay by Johanna Fateman of Le Tigre.
To get a better understanding of the bigger picture, I read Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. This book lays out the history, personalities, accomplishments, drama, and eventual decline from the peak of the Riot Grrrl movement in the mid-1990s, around that time that Billie puts together issue #5 of her own zine, Final Grrrl. If you’re interested in more than just the Wikipedia entry on Riot Grrrl, then this is perhaps the best consolidated resource.
But for a more complete sensory immersion in Riot Grrrl, I recommend Sini Anderson’s 2013 documentary The Punk Singer. This doc focuses on the story of Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, as the spine of the film, but it also manages to establish a lot of the context for the wider movement. Most important for me, it presents the sights and sounds of Riot Grrrl together, most often through the voices of the women who made it happen. It’s fascinating and compelling, and I highly recommend it as a place to start, if you find yourself wanting to know more about Riot Grrrl.
Of course, there’s a ton more out there. In particular, I recommend looking into the amazing archiving and teaching work being done by people like Dr. Alana Kumbier. Alana and I knew each other in graduate school, and I’m fairly certain her work is where I became aware of Riot Grrrl zine culture in the first place. She has been involved in researching and supporting archives of zines and other ephemera, particularly related to queer communities and producers (like QZAP – The Queer Zine Archive Project), and she has co-taught courses on Riot Grrrl and zines.
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.
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)
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.
Like many a blog before it, and probably many to come, this blog represents a new beginning.
For the past two decades, I have primarily been an academic. I spent about eight years pursuing a Ph.D. in film studies at The Ohio State University before I was fortunate enough to become a professor, first at Union College in Schenectady, NY and then later on at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. I enjoy teaching, and I had good jobs that supported the work I was doing, whether that was traditional scholarly research or creative work like screenplays, films, or fiction.
Now, I’m setting out on a new phase of my professional life. My partner is pursuing a dream job in Pennsylvania, and I’m going with her. This comes precisely as my debut novel hits the shelves and some new, exciting, and scary opportunities open up. So, I have resigned my tenured position as an Associate Professor of Film in order to write full-time. I will still likely pick up some classes here and there, but I may never again hold a professorship.
Joseph Campbell wrote, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.” Freelancing is absolutely the cave I fear to enter. I have always pursued more stable and secure forms of employment, and contemporary professional writing is anything but that. I know it will be very different from my career up to now, but I also think I have finally honed the discipline and the self-awareness that will keep me on track, butt in the seat, every day.
Sure, this site is my artist/author landing page, but my plan is to keep things interesting for you here, too, by sharing tidbits of research from past work, works in progress, and other odd things that wash up now and then. I hope you enjoy. Feel free to follow here and on social media. (I’m more active on Facebook than Twitter, for now.)
