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Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows
Underground filmmaker Tina Mori became a legend in the late 1970s with a stolen camera, a series of visionary Super 8 shorts (The Eye, The Stairs, The Imperial Dynasty of America) and a single feature film, heralded as her masterpiece, Dragon’s Teeth. Then she disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Was it foul play, or did Tina Mori go somewhere else? And if so, where? Could it have been the otherworldly Carcosa so often referenced in her films?
Through many layers, including letters, a ‘zine made by a teenage horror film fan, and a memoir written by Mori’s college roommate and muse, film historian and debut novelist Brian Hauser delves deep into Tina Mori’s life and legacy, exploring the strange depths and fathomless shadows situated between truth, fiction, fantasy, and the uncanny.
Through many layers, including letters, a ‘zine made by a teenage horror film fan, and a memoir written by Mori’s college roommate and muse, film historian and debut novelist Brian Hauser delves deep into Tina Mori’s life and legacy, exploring the strange depths and fathomless shadows situated between truth, fiction, fantasy, and the uncanny.
258 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 26, 2025
(3.5) This opens with a neat little nesting doll of narratives: first, a foreword from the author positioning everything that follows as a true story (a good reality-blurring gimmick is guaranteed to pull me in); then an issue of Final Grrl, a feminist horror zine penned by missing teenager Billie Jacobs shortly before her disappearance; and then, finally, the meat of the book: ‘Memento Mori’ itself, a biography of the mysterious (and also missing) auteur Tina Mori, written by her friend and collaborator C.C. Waite. It’s a great setup and these are fantastic ingredients for lost-media horror.
Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows is, it turns out, heavily – and I do mean heavily – indebted to Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, which is referenced frequently. I’ve never finished The King in Yellow – from what I can remember, I think my problem with it was simply that the tiny glimpses we get of the play are so much more interesting than anything else. Funnily enough, this book has the opposite problem. I was deeply unconvinced by the idea that Tina’s work would become legendary. Tina and C.C. are not in themselves interesting, and most of the descriptions of Tina’s films make them sound like exactly the sort of stuff any first-year student might come up with. (Maybe this, the focus on pretentious students, is also a King in Yellow reference, albeit referencing the part nobody likes.)
I kept reading for the cursed-film stuff plus some sense of how these characters’ fates might tie up with that of the missing girl. I found the book slower going than expected, although when the weird scenes do come, they are well executed. There are some truly creepy sequences with serious atmosphere, but I would have liked more Billie (her voice in the zine is great, really convincing), more of a mixed-media approach, something to break up the faux-biography. Those deeply into The King in Yellow and its lore will no doubt appreciate this the most.
Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows is, it turns out, heavily – and I do mean heavily – indebted to Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, which is referenced frequently. I’ve never finished The King in Yellow – from what I can remember, I think my problem with it was simply that the tiny glimpses we get of the play are so much more interesting than anything else. Funnily enough, this book has the opposite problem. I was deeply unconvinced by the idea that Tina’s work would become legendary. Tina and C.C. are not in themselves interesting, and most of the descriptions of Tina’s films make them sound like exactly the sort of stuff any first-year student might come up with. (Maybe this, the focus on pretentious students, is also a King in Yellow reference, albeit referencing the part nobody likes.)
I kept reading for the cursed-film stuff plus some sense of how these characters’ fates might tie up with that of the missing girl. I found the book slower going than expected, although when the weird scenes do come, they are well executed. There are some truly creepy sequences with serious atmosphere, but I would have liked more Billie (her voice in the zine is great, really convincing), more of a mixed-media approach, something to break up the faux-biography. Those deeply into The King in Yellow and its lore will no doubt appreciate this the most.
June 10, 2019
”She danced in Carcosa. And then she came back.”
A remarkable debut from Brian Hauser, a novel of cosmic horror drinking from Robert W. Chambers’ The King In Yellow, infused with a deep love for cinema and with an unusual structure. Combining the technique of the found paper and the fake memoir, it’s literally a collage of documents (a fanzine, a memoir, a letter), that helps to make the story more vivid (actually, I was wonderfully deceived at some point during the introduction, thinking that Billie Jacobs, the young girl behind the Final Grrrl fanzine had existed - until it stopped working, it was magic). The center of the story is the recollection of the friendship between C.C. Waite (the author of the memoir) and Tina Mori (who would later become an underground film legend), at the time they were both college students in the 70s.
There’s a lot of good things in this debut. It captures the fascinating mixture of bliss and dread from cosmic horror at its best, as if letting ourselves go into the new horror reality that the characters discover in the story would liberate us. There’s also the effective description of Tina’s haunting movies, with all the surrounding atmosphere that makes the presentation of her movies close to art happenings. It also transmits that sensation you experience when you realize how transformative art can get to be. It made me remember the ecstatic feeling I had when I watched for the first time the early surrealist films by Buñuel. In this case, Hauser takes the idea of transformative cinema to its ultimate expression.
If you happen to love both cinema and horror, you should check it out. Don’t worry, you’ll come back.
A remarkable debut from Brian Hauser, a novel of cosmic horror drinking from Robert W. Chambers’ The King In Yellow, infused with a deep love for cinema and with an unusual structure. Combining the technique of the found paper and the fake memoir, it’s literally a collage of documents (a fanzine, a memoir, a letter), that helps to make the story more vivid (actually, I was wonderfully deceived at some point during the introduction, thinking that Billie Jacobs, the young girl behind the Final Grrrl fanzine had existed - until it stopped working, it was magic). The center of the story is the recollection of the friendship between C.C. Waite (the author of the memoir) and Tina Mori (who would later become an underground film legend), at the time they were both college students in the 70s.
There’s a lot of good things in this debut. It captures the fascinating mixture of bliss and dread from cosmic horror at its best, as if letting ourselves go into the new horror reality that the characters discover in the story would liberate us. There’s also the effective description of Tina’s haunting movies, with all the surrounding atmosphere that makes the presentation of her movies close to art happenings. It also transmits that sensation you experience when you realize how transformative art can get to be. It made me remember the ecstatic feeling I had when I watched for the first time the early surrealist films by Buñuel. In this case, Hauser takes the idea of transformative cinema to its ultimate expression.
If you happen to love both cinema and horror, you should check it out. Don’t worry, you’ll come back.
August 19, 2019
I really enjoyed the earlier sections, and would have loved to see this develop differently. This has quite the list of my ongoing obsessions (zines! dark, obscure and abstract films! vintage media! etc). Not having read The King in Yellow, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of references other than the obvious namedropping (Carcosa, Hali, ahem yellow, etc).
The fake "zine" section is quite charming and nicely done, even though it would come across better if we had some graphics. C.C. Waite's (oh darn, is that another Lovecraftian in-joke? I'm thankful that she didn't turn into some aquatic monster) memoir takes its time to get going. But once Tina Mori gets her camera, things get pleasantly (?) uncomfortable fast.
Being from a generation that had a taste of 80s/90s New York, I really enjoyed the protagonists' adventures in the big city. Descriptions of the first two films were pretty promising, but "Imperial Dynasty of America" just seemed like a collection of cliches. I wouldn't mind seeing the last film, "Dragons' Teeth", hooded figures and all. Speaking of which, by this point, there were a lot of hooded, robed figures, and a lot of Carcosa. So your reaction might depend on your predilection for such.
I know memoirs tend more often to be rambling messes than not (which is why I don't read many). Waite's was certainly wearing on me near the end, with sentences like:
Waite's memoir has the expected entertaining namedropping (Cinema of Transgression etc). But there are also surprisingly longwinded explanations of art movements etc. Surely an underground film enthusiast, who would hunt down a memoir about the obscure Tina Mori, would not need this explanation of happenings:
I could forgive the rambling in the final letter from Mori; after all, it was a personal letter to an old friend. But it was hard for me take the unnecessary explanations of the dragon, the ingestions etc etc, especially after the beautifully terse sticky right before the letter, a few neutral, suggestive sentences, ending with:
(Not really a spoiler, but you should enjoy it in context in the novel.)
So this was a rather frustrating experience for me. Most of it was reasonably restrained, though King in Yellow fans might find it well-trodden territory. (I certainly had enough of robed figures by the end.) The adventures of the young women in pre-gentrification Manhattan were great fun, and nicely executed. There were genuinely unsettling and memorable moments. And I'm probably in the minority regarding the stylistic decisions I grumbled about.
And it's time for me to start this list!
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
The fake "zine" section is quite charming and nicely done, even though it would come across better if we had some graphics. C.C. Waite's (oh darn, is that another Lovecraftian in-joke? I'm thankful that she didn't turn into some aquatic monster) memoir takes its time to get going. But once Tina Mori gets her camera, things get pleasantly (?) uncomfortable fast.
Being from a generation that had a taste of 80s/90s New York, I really enjoyed the protagonists' adventures in the big city. Descriptions of the first two films were pretty promising, but "Imperial Dynasty of America" just seemed like a collection of cliches. I wouldn't mind seeing the last film, "Dragons' Teeth", hooded figures and all. Speaking of which, by this point, there were a lot of hooded, robed figures, and a lot of Carcosa. So your reaction might depend on your predilection for such.
I know memoirs tend more often to be rambling messes than not (which is why I don't read many). Waite's was certainly wearing on me near the end, with sentences like:
I still have nights where I lie awake turning over in my mind the awareness that the extent of the mediocrity at the time was evident by the level of my fear.
Waite's memoir has the expected entertaining namedropping (Cinema of Transgression etc). But there are also surprisingly longwinded explanations of art movements etc. Surely an underground film enthusiast, who would hunt down a memoir about the obscure Tina Mori, would not need this explanation of happenings:
Artists were looking for a way to shake things up and do it all differently, and they came up with the idea of extending painting into the three-dimensional exhibition space. It wasn't the flat plane of the canvas in a room with a bunch of eyeballs. The art was happening around you, and often it was happening in time, not just space.(It goes on for a few more lines, unfortunately.)
I could forgive the rambling in the final letter from Mori; after all, it was a personal letter to an old friend. But it was hard for me take the unnecessary explanations of the dragon, the ingestions etc etc, especially after the beautifully terse sticky right before the letter, a few neutral, suggestive sentences, ending with:
(Not really a spoiler, but you should enjoy it in context in the novel.)
So this was a rather frustrating experience for me. Most of it was reasonably restrained, though King in Yellow fans might find it well-trodden territory. (I certainly had enough of robed figures by the end.) The adventures of the young women in pre-gentrification Manhattan were great fun, and nicely executed. There were genuinely unsettling and memorable moments. And I'm probably in the minority regarding the stylistic decisions I grumbled about.
And it's time for me to start this list!
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
December 25, 2024
Was a little disappointed by the ending and over explanation in the letter, but it held me tightly till then. Some geniunely unnerving things in here
November 22, 2024
How is this book so underrated?!
March 25, 2022
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).
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).
May 14, 2021
i enjoyed this novel for the most part, and it was well-written.
but somehow it all felt like set-up for a larger story, which never got told. light spoilers ahead.
see, the bulk of Memento Mori is made up of a book within the book, a memoir written by character C.C. about the time she spent with Tina Mori during their young adulthood. but before we get to that memoir, there's some other material which, while doing an admirable job of world-building and intriguing the reader, really paints Tina Mori as this sort of cult phenomenon, whose name would be known to most any connoisseur of 70s avant-garde and horror cinema.
for that reason, throughout the C.C. memoir i kept waiting for Tina to become notorious, or even to do something that would later make her notorious. i only realized when i was around 90% through the e-book that this wasn't all set-up, this was just the whole shebang.
on one level i admire the restraint! but it sort of belied the intro material which depicted Tina Mori as an esoteric but beloved legend. still there's a lot to enjoy here, an impressively atmospheric spooky novel.
but somehow it all felt like set-up for a larger story, which never got told. light spoilers ahead.
see, the bulk of Memento Mori is made up of a book within the book, a memoir written by character C.C. about the time she spent with Tina Mori during their young adulthood. but before we get to that memoir, there's some other material which, while doing an admirable job of world-building and intriguing the reader, really paints Tina Mori as this sort of cult phenomenon, whose name would be known to most any connoisseur of 70s avant-garde and horror cinema.
for that reason, throughout the C.C. memoir i kept waiting for Tina to become notorious, or even to do something that would later make her notorious. i only realized when i was around 90% through the e-book that this wasn't all set-up, this was just the whole shebang.
on one level i admire the restraint! but it sort of belied the intro material which depicted Tina Mori as an esoteric but beloved legend. still there's a lot to enjoy here, an impressively atmospheric spooky novel.
September 24, 2020
This book was oddly constructed, disjointed, and meandering. It starts with a short fictional intro, a horror magazine (could have done with a lot more of that), an overly long book within the book, and then a final short letter that was just meh. However the creep factor was A+ and a few parts of the book were fantastic. With the Yellow King, cults, cursed films, etc. this was definitely a memorable story. I would read this author again.
January 29, 2022
3.5
Definitely a book of interest: King in Yellow, mysterious avant-garde horror film maker, cults, haunted films—just a bit inconsistent in delivery—some terrific parts/passages followed by long winded philosophical ramblings. It took me a long time to get through—but I could’ve been distracted—I would recommend—
Definitely a book of interest: King in Yellow, mysterious avant-garde horror film maker, cults, haunted films—just a bit inconsistent in delivery—some terrific parts/passages followed by long winded philosophical ramblings. It took me a long time to get through—but I could’ve been distracted—I would recommend—
June 16, 2019
This is well written. Not my favorite genre but worthy of 4 stars.
August 13, 2019
Creepy and captivating. Couldn't put it down.
November 25, 2019
Like all good entries to the Carcosan corpus, this tale does a wonderful job walking the liminal tightrope between waking and dreaming, and this world and the next.
August 3, 2019
Atmospheric
A novel filled with dark images and a deep sense of dread. Hauser spins a macabre tale of the power of film and the dangers of looking too hard!
A novel filled with dark images and a deep sense of dread. Hauser spins a macabre tale of the power of film and the dangers of looking too hard!
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