what happens when you go back to Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel—a place everyone knows through estonia’s only cult film?
a book that appears to be written in the form of a monograph or creative research is in fact a metamodernist autofictional novel, a performance in the shape of a book. it is an inner monologue from a character about whom we learn nothing except that he has a lifelong obsession with a film he saw in childhood
behind a single cultural artifact there seems to be something indeterminate hidden. if not the formula of the universe, then at least a certain generational secret code. the book is written from notes accumulated over twenty years on journeys to places that feel significant in relation to the film. the text weaves together documentary elements and philosophical speculation, personal memory-work and cultural analysis
existential and ontological themes come to the fore: science fiction, collapse, isolation from oneself, alienation and estrangement, experience and state, the borderlands of consciousness. it explores connections between hyperrealist culture, buddhist philosophy of emptiness, and the sovereignty of mind, as well as points of contact between electronic music and futuristic technology. throughout, it also examines the cognitive patterns underlying paranormal beliefs and the limits of cultural imagination