Dim Shores 2016
When I real-time review this chapbook, my comments will be found in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Review
'…a veritable living, breathing map of the fantastic fiction that is emerging into the world in these troubled times. '
Nearly forty pages, with two stories, and photographic art by Natalia Drepina.
This copy is numbered 132/150.
SPLIT TONGUES
“Things we aren’t supposed to see.”
Things we aren’t supposed to read about, too.
A powerful dark-Christian tale of young Brianne and her separated parents, before which many of us readers would have assumed our dreams are separate, too, separate from real life and from each other. But are they ever? Overlapping here, they create, I feel, various word biopsies in the physical form of tongue, revealed words that tell Brianne – and, via her, us – of the sexually accretive mutability of herself, her mother, father and the boy whom she fancies…indeed of the fleshy soul itself secreted within.
To speak more of it would let you see too much…
I couldn’t resist reading on straightaway to the second story, to what I assume would be a short coda to this publication’s eponymous work and, although I was half right in my assumption, it now stands on its own with my having completed it… As a coda of this publication but also as its poetic apotheosis…
Another glimpse of Brianne and her mother?
THE DREAM EATER
“The nightmares split open on my tongue.”
This coda is in itself a meal replacement pill, passing over the tongue, not into the stomach but into a dream-claustrophobia… A green endworld, if that is not a contradiction in terms.
A story of a sin-eater in the guise of dream. A complex empathy with love being a palimpsest of awfulness and stoical acceptance of that awfulness, of God’s forked tongue and a blessed unvirgin mother. A reverential awfulness, that dark-Christian awe or aura, making this publication possibly the first of such a dark-Christian genre of fiction? Where God the father dug a well that you can never reach. The Life of Brianne. This chapbook’s front cover image.
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