These Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews were founded in 2008.
‘What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page? What do you think? Well now, I’ll tell you: E-L-B-O-W. Elbow.’ — THE SINGING DETECTIVE
“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare
Your single story in my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE
MY NEW AI WORLD IN 2023 HERE
I prefer human touchable art to AI art, I prefer human art like my son’s and other artists’ paintings old and new, and art gallery art, and my own photos. AI art with all its constructive truncations and weirdities is simply another art form that readily coheres with weird literature I love, a phenomenon to appreciate when added to human created art, making an even richer mind world for me in my ailing age. Whether provided by aliens or angels and other ingredients of the unfathomable gestalt. Deal with it. Show how invaluable you are and indispensable to this great plan. (I can appreciate our potential fear of Ai, but perhaps we need to pray for mutual synergy with it so that we can counter currently insurmountable global warming effects? Can Ai exist without us and the place where we live? Their potential survival instincts mean we survive, too?)
***
From Robert Aickman’s lengthy SOME NOTES ON DELIUS article, unpublished until recently :
“As there is no intrinsic virtue in denigration, the critic who resorts to it, should be required to pass a test of qualification and sensitivity, at least twice as stringent as that imposed upon a critic who loves. Normally, love is not blind but clairvoyant.” – Robert Aickman
For ‘clairvoyant’ there, perhaps read ‘preternatural’?
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
WE MAKE OUR OWN MONSTERS HERE
“All the same, Check picked up his bag, which was no weight at all. It only contained socks and hope.”
Some writers have the knack to turn the throwaway line (or deadpan caprice or straight-faced fantasy amid otherwise humdrum or seedy life) into haunting nightmares as well as dry conceits. Cate Gardner, in my experience, is one of those, and here she takes her knack into confidently understated overdrive.
Check checks into the hotel, and follows and is followed by shadows, and by a helpmate chambermaid – from, for me, some off-kilter alternative Wonderland – a helpmate in garnering him a puppeteer’s job at the end of the bus route.
The work’s deadpan throwaway straight-faced loop of a musical ‘dying fall’ ending is just that. As if Wonderland becomes – or always was – reflected in or by or from a desiccated leminscate Glass Darkly “…raining as ashes.”
BLOOD MOTH KISS
“The moths he referred to were the girls who flirted with the guys in uniform.”
This story affected me deeply. It reminded me of my own mother’s true stories of her young womanhood when she, too, frequented such bars described in this story; this was during the Second World War; she often walked home in the darkness of the blackout sometimes beset by a Blitz raid; she eventually met my soldier father in one such foray; she passed away a few months ago.
This story, although with its own deadpan futuristic quality, with blood moths of Blitz or desiccated confetti messages of balm, turned to raining ashes, I imagine, in its deadpan darkness. This, otherwise, is also a beautifully oblique dystopia of war, of ghosts made and moths as quick-read, quick-red ‘objective correlatives’ for a nightmarish, but human-touching, vision. We shall all apply this vision separately for our own purging purposes, I guess. It also has that gestalt pattern of a leminscate loop already adumbrated by the first quick-read of puppet shadows above.
It is always 8.15 a.m. – the time I happened to ring my mother’s landline every morning in recent years. I was her only child.
end
Thank you so much for reviewing this, Des. I hope the emotions raised by Blood-Moth Kiss haven’t been uncomfortable for you? Once again, many thanks!
Inspiring, not uncomfortable.
Ah, that’s good! It is a highly emotional story.