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Things are not brilliant in the personal health regime of the Gestalt Real-Time Reviewer, so please excuse any delays in whatever I do. (from June 2021)
GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWING
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And Click: HERE for full Navigation, Stop Press & Backstory.
Träumerei: Co-Vivid Dreaming
DFS LEWIS: Reading Aloud
Available DFL books: HERE
The Three Ages of D.F. Lewis
0. 1948-1985 — Poems / Zeroist Group (1960s), The Visitor (Novel) 1973, Agra Aska (novella) 1983.
1. 1986-2000 – Over 1000 fiction publications in magazines and anthologies, some selected for the Prime Books D.F. Lewis collection ‘Weirdmonger’ (2003). Work once in Stand, Iron, Panurge, Orbis, London Magazine….
I was awarded the BFS Karl Edward Wagner Award.
2. 2001-2010 – Publishing multi-authored ‘Nemonymous’.
3. 2008-
GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWING (www.nemonymous.com),
Plus one novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT (Chômu Press), a story collection and two novellas entitled THE LAST BALCONY (InkerMen Press), and a novella entitled Weirdtongue (InkerMen Press), and my reprint of Agra Aska that was originally published in 1998 by Scorpion Press,
Plus three originally created multi-authored anthologies that I published,
Plus two books from Mount Abraxas Press, and an Eibonvale chapbook called The Big Headed People. And a book collection from Eibonvale: DABBLING WITH DIABELLI,
Plus, in July 2020, a past story selected for THE BIG BOOK OF MODERN FANTASY edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
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THE LAST BALCONY: HERE
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After many satisfying years of gestalt real-time reviewing, it now feels really special to see one of my own old stories showcased here!
My detailed review of this Big Book: HERE
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The ultimate expression of Gluey Zenoism from an author who wrote The Demon Lover in one of the Aickman Fontana Ghost Books:
“‘I’ll tell you something, Clara. Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand? Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’ So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs. ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute. I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty. The ticking stops.”
From ‘The Inherited Clock’ (1944) by Elizabeth Bowen
MASK
The Ha of Ha above.
Late Labelling:
“Des Lewis obviously needs no presentation to the wayward fantasts. Even if I have enjoyed reading his fine volumes for Dan Watt’s press and the one for Chomu Press two volumes I recommend I feel like there is still space and reasons to discover D.F. Lewis. It is no easy feat to break Mr. Lewis’s Code. His work is constructed like a house, almost like a living mausoleum, according to his particular way of thinking. In other words: astonishing and uncomprehending. There is no key to this house, although there are a lot of doors. Everything is available, everything is waiting to be plucked but few dare knock at the door. Caution is good. Running away is even better. You don t read Des Lewis to understand and enjoy his works. That’s not the point. You read him because you have to believe in something, after all.” (EOP)
Pages 7 – 27
“Deep down inside him, something had… dislodged.”
This takes me about halfway in this story within this flaccidly tactile chapbook as a physical object, so appropriate for reading at swimming pools when not swimming, about a boy taken by car by his separated slightly-alcoholic mother to that swimming pool over a pothole, his elder sister’s special wink at him in the car about knowing-things between them, flip-flops, water-wings or angel-wings, then another boy in that pool as a different point of view, an incident of bullying, and a fragile, frangible reality of hard-surfaces softened by water that swimming pools seem to have, a sensory-aversionary smell and baking heat under foot at the side of the pool, ominous with I know not what, something perhaps no lifeguard as the author can prevent – even if he wanted to do so.
Very atmospheric. I feel I am THERE sub-merging myself with the pool of text … and I will keep the subtle suspense pent up for a while before reading the rest. NO spoilers, just remembering his sister’s school’s called Middlemarch Middle.
Pages 28 – 50
“The children in the water were flowing in a circle,…”
The various feelers of this story’s first half (grown-up and adolescent bullying and sexual politics, swimming-pools as a strikingly inchoate metaphor and, for me, something like Azathoth at the earth’s core) are literally and literarily fulfilled to such an extent that your clambering out of this text is tantamount to sinking back in again. We need such inchoate metaphors to help humanity make cracks coherent and, thus, transcendable. Horror without victims.
A bursting bubble of a reading experience. Not to be missed.