Memento Mori by Oliver Kane

The phrase “Memento Mori” is a reminder of our impermanence. It reminds us that death taunts life with both its nonchalance and indiscrimination and with its much greater dominion over the span of time. This collection of short, connected stories is a reflection of that phrase and the concepts behind it. Moreover, the through-line in all of these stories is death itself, how it comes to those rich and poor, righteous and evil, innocent and corrupt. How it comes to all.

Holes:
Holes tells the tale of a troubled man besieged by tiny invaders.

To Weather the Storm:
A tale of misery, loss, and degredation, all from the persective of a little girl’s bedroom wall.

Black Hands and Dying Stars:
Black Hands and Dying Stars is a tale that explores the consequences of thievery, adultery, and cursed art. Matthias William Byrne thinks the night is a normal one; he thinks that his new mark, Mrs. Gina Stanhope, is a normal one. An easy one, even. But in her near obsession with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in her collection of ‘dark art’, and in Mrs. Gina Stanhope herself, Matthias finds only lust and contempt and confusion…and perhaps something darker.

Imboden:
Imboden is a tale told in shifting perspective, a tale told out of time; it is a tale of madness and of violation and of a dark enunciation: a thousand words wrapped in one, wrapped in none.

In Polka Dot Pants:
Mason Thomas, a boy blessed and cursed with the ability to read others’ thoughts and intentions, finds himself plagued by an ill dream of a party clown with a penchant for violence. This entity pulls Mason and his mother into a world of its own creation, a world that is also a memory. Dark is its arena, yet darker still is the clown’s true face, and the forms of its brethren. What is it that seeks power through torture? How can one boy and his mother hope to survive against something so ghastly and so very old?