Totally Biased Review #6: Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows by Brian Hauser

I had a lot of fun reading Brian Hauser’s debut novel, Memento Mori. It is explicitly a King in Yellow story, but it also fits into the “lost film” subgenre. I’ve been thinking of it as a kind of cousin to Gemma Files’s excellent Experimental Film and the Pine Arch Collective stories by Michael Wehunt. If you like Robert Chambers’s mythos, Maya Deren, and the underground/punk scene of late 1970s New York City, then this book will be for you.

This novel is presented as a series of found documents, the bulk of which is a memoir by the character C.C. Waites about her time with underground horror filmmaker Tina Mori (hence the title of both the novel and the memoir). The memoir details how she and Tina met as freshmen in college, how Tina discovered the power of cinema, their adventures together, and how The Yellow Sign hangs over their lives. The other elements are an introduction and afterword by the academic identified only as BRH (a stand-in for the author, I assume, as they share initials), the unpublished fifth issue of a zine by a teenage girl who went missing in the nineties, and a letter from Tina Mori, all of which forms a frame for the memoir and provides a chilling conclusion to the novel.

There is a line towards the end of BRH’s introduction that goes, “There is a nameless fear pressed into these pages, something that threatens to unleash itself with each reading.” This is one of my favorite tropes, the idea of the book is dangerous to those who read it (see also Mister B. Gone and House of Leaves). This trope always primes my spine for shivers. Of course, this also parallels what the play “The King in Yellow” does to characters who read it in the world of the story.

Another aspect about this novel I like is how the reader can imagine it as an artifact from a parallel reality (I suppose I should say, for clarity's sake, that it is not that; this book is the product of the author's fertile and vibrant imagination). The text itself invites such play, as it touches not just on dim Carcosa but also on the idea of parallel realities. BRH certainly stands for Brian R. Hauser, but it is not this world’s Brian Hauser. There may not be a SUNY Red Stone here, but there is certainly one in the world of the story, and who’s to say there isn’t one elsewhere?

To reiterate, this is an entertaining read and if anything above seems intriguing then you should definitely check it out. Pairs well with Robert Chambers's collection The King in Yellow, the anthology Lost Video edited by Max Booth III and Laurie Michelle, the novel Experimental Film by Gemma Files, and the film The Driller Killer (dir. Abel Ferrara, 1979).

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