NecronomiCon 2019 and the New WIP

Last weekend was NecronomiCon 2019 in Providence, RI. This was my first time attending, though I have been reading about it for years. Up until this past year, I always considered myself more of a filmmaker and film scholar of the weird, so this more literary-focused event couldn’t compete for time and funds alongside the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, The Outer Dark Symposium, and other academic conferences that were a bit more central to my pursuit of tenure and promotion as a professor of film. This is a new path, though, and conferences like NecronomiCon, NECon, and ReaderCon are likely to be much more central to my writing life going forward.

I know I am hardly alone among my fellow authors in saying that I am not particularly good at cons. I want very much to be part of the group, or what looks like a group from the outside, but I am not a natural extrovert. I want to sit in a corner or a bar or a cafe and talk shop with people. I want to go to room parties, but I worry that I don’t belong, that I’m intruding. This anxiety was much easier to believe whole-heartedly when my primary accomplishments were as a screenwriter of some minor merit. Being a finalist several times over and even winning an award or two doesn’t confer a lot of credibility, because screenplays that don’t become films are largely invisible as accomplishments. Like scholarly essays, only a tiny number of people have actually read them.

Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows has changed that for me, both in my mind and in the minds of others to some extent. As a fiction writer, I came to this conference with a novel freshly out of the gate from a well-known and widely respected press. I not only got to meet authors I’ve admired from afar for years, but several of them had read my book, and they like it! It’s just crazy. It’s gratifying and motivating and…just wonderful. I want people to enjoy that book, but in a lot of ways, these are the people for whom I wrote it. They are the readers who I already know have a taste for this sort of thing. Most if not all fiction is part of a conversation, and these folks are absolutely my interlocutors. To be seen and recognized as one of them, literally and figuratively, is a genuine homecoming.

I set out to challenge myself at this con by doing my best to speak with people, to make new friends, and to praise the authors of stories I have enjoyed to their faces. I was able to do that, and it felt good. It’s far easier to thank people honestly for their art than it is to make small talk. That’s a good step forward, but I will try to do more next time. And the next opportunity comes soon.

In early October, I will be at this year’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Portland, OR at the Hollywood Theater, where this year’s Guests of Honor include Victoria Price (Vincent’s daughter), Roger Corman, and Richard Stanley with his new adaptation of The Colour Out of Space, starring Nicholas Cage! WTF? The HPLFF is a fine opportunity to pass through the veil and finally see what the room parties are all about.*

In the meantime, I am fully engaged in the beginning of the new work in progress (WIP). This novel has been popping up now and again in my daily writing practice (30 minutes, every morning, long-hand), but it has been amorphous for months. I had enough of a concept for there to be a pitch (which I am mostly keeping to myself for the moment), but a more solid grasp of character and plot and the nature of the weird at the heart of it all remained elusive until this past week. Though there was no one crystalizing moment, I expect that the atmosphere of NecronomiCon helped to push me in the right direction. So now I have consolidated all of those daily notes and I can see the vague outline now. I start to know the people in this story. I can smell the fresh water of Lake Michigan and the murkier darkness that clings to the shore near the mouth of the river.

* Full Disclosure: I did actually go to a room party at the very first HPLFF I ever attended in 2003, but there was absinthe and pleather and I only remember flashes of it. Now that I think of it, it’s entirely possible that I never made it out of that room…

A Clockwork Caméra-Stylo

In Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows, Tina Mori steals a wind-up Super 8 film camera from a professor of Russian language and literature. This is the camera she uses to make all of her early films. But it’s not a cursed camera or anything like that. It’s a little weird maybe, but it’s certainly not supernatural.

The Soviet Union manufactured hundreds of thousands of these and other motion picture cameras. The first I ever owned was the 16mm Krasnogrosk K-3 motion picture kit, and the Super 8 Zenit 1x8C-2 and its kin are like younger siblings. Now I have four or five of them. Yes, I have a problem.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, these cameras have flooded secondary markets like eBay, where you can routinely find them for sale at bargain prices. These are quite often barely used if at all, especially if they are being sold from the Ukraine or Belarus. I imagine gigantic warehouses of 30-year-old camera kits just waiting to find homes with nostalgic hobbyists.

But I think nostalgia isn’t quite right, either. Kodak still manufactures Super 8 film (it is even bringing back a limited selection of discontinued film stocks, though not Kodachrome as yet), and they are famously attempting to reintroduce a hybrid Super 8/digital motion picture camera for today’s consumers.

There are also companies like Pro8mm, who not only sell Super 8 film and processing (including conversion to digital files for editing and output), but they also refurbish cameras into like new or better condition. There are also still film labs that process these smaller gauge formats, though certainly far, far fewer than in decades past.

While Kodak’s new camera is a hybrid of digital and analog technology, the Zenit Super 8 camera is almost entirely, doggedly, brutally analog (it does have a battery-powered internal light meter). While most of the Super 8 cameras that people bought in the U.S. and Western Europe and elsewhere had battery-powered motors and were made mostly of plastic, the Zenit is a lot of die cast metal and heavy composites. It’s weighty. To give you a better sense of it, here’s a short YouTube review of the 1x8S-2 (which is the version of the camera that was sold outside the USSR under the market name Kinoflex). The reviewer is German.

Aside from always delicate lenses, these cameras are virtually impossible to break during normal use. That’s certainly not the case with a lot of old Super 8 camera that you might have bought at the local department store or camera shop. And they can do everything except synchronized sound.

All of this tends to inspire romantic people like me (who wrote Memento Mori on a manual typewriter–no Delete key!). Why not make a movie with one of these? Many, many aspiring filmmakers still find their way to Super 8 as a filmmaking format either out of a retro sensibility, or an appreciation of film’s discipline over digital, or a sincere love of the small gauge film visual aesthetic. Of course, since each cartridge is only about three minutes of footage at normal speed, most of these films are short. In fact, there is an annual global competition called Straight8 that challenges filmmakers to make a short film in Super8 with all in-camera editing (go the page, check out some classic samples, ZOMG). That is, you don’t get to edit anything after the fact. You shoot each shot in order, send off the cartridge, and hope it all worked out! Here is Edgar Wright’s amazing Straight8, Forced Hilarity, which Wright introduces.

But others have been even more ambitious, if not more successful. Here is John Hand on trying to shoot in feature film on Super 8 in the 21st Century. Another guerrilla project, Buster, managed to do the Super 8 feature thing, as well.

All of these things, along with the decades-long history of home and amateur film enthusiasts that I have read about extensively, my own experiences growing up watching the Hauser family home movies on 8mm film (and inheriting many of them recently), and my more recent interest and research in the underground film scene contributed to the creation of Tina Mori’s obsession.

Next time, I’ll introduce you to that underground film world. But until then, do you have any memories of watching celluloid home movies? How is that experience, or your memories of that experience, different from the cellphone video that we see everywhere all the time now? I want to hear what you think.

“No requests for Cassilda’s Song while we’re rocking on Washington Scare.”

As promised, here is the second Lethal Chamber track from Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows, courtesy of my insanely talented brother, Kurt Hauser. It’s called “Washington Scare.”

I love how this one starts a little slower and then breaks into the full, up-tempo, punk rock chaos.

Give it a listen and let me know what you think!

Though I’m not quite ready to give you details yet, I can say that the next project is underway. We undertook a big household move from northern New York state to central Pennsylvania over the past month, and we’re only just now reaching the point where we are surrounded by more order than chaos (at least inside our house). I’ve finally been able to devote more consistent mental space to moving that WIP along, and let me tell you, that feels good. In a couple of weeks, I think I’ll be able to start reporting word counts.

This Saturday I have my next reading. I’ll be at the Bucknell University Bookstore Barnes & Noble at 3pm reading from Memento Mori. Later in August, I’ll be at NecronomiCon in Providence, RI, and then in October, I will be at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthuchuCon. I’m lining up a couple more events immediately after that, and I will announce those here as soon as I can.

Lethal Chamber “Past the Fates”

OMG OMG OMG, you guys.

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.

Readings Are Fundamental

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…

Location, Location, Location

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?

Riot Grrrl, Final Grrrl

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).

Image from The Art Book Review

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.

Image result for girls to the front

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 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.