Please use the Search Box above for author, title, publisher etc.
Twitter: @DF_Lewis
Träumerei: Co-Vivid Dreaming
DFS LEWIS: Reading Aloud
Reviews linked for each year: 2008/9 – 2010 – 2011 – 2012 – 2013 – 2014 – 2015 – 2016 – 2017 – 2018 – 2019 – 2020
And Click: HERE for full Navigation, Stop Press & Backstory.
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).
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.
***************
THE LAST BALCONY: HERE
***************
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
****************************
MASK
An aesthetic pamphlet with over ten densely texted pages, plus a title page and five full page photographs in addition to the outside cover. My copy is numbered 14/100
—————-
From start at “In the summer of that year” to “I have never forgotten him.”
“Part of my purpose in going to Whirlwell was to gather folklore about folklore.”
The narrator’s enthralling quest – in person, by dint of ‘spoor’ and from research – for the cockatrice, at first in this byway of Hampshire where he dares talk to only one person (hoping he is not the village idiot?) while he is there. And that is as far as I have got.
This, so far, is engaging, rurally urbane, Valentine-vintage textwork.
From “I suppose it ought to have been one of those summer days…” to “…I had a feeling that I must remember the moment. There was a quality about it I could not quite identify.”
Comfortable narrative of a church’s missing weather-vane depicting a cockatrice, meeting a man with four coloured jam jars and a sign of the cockatrice on the local pub, a magazine about mazes, but nothing about a megazanthus.
From “We came to a narrow house…” to “…of his fantastical model.”
Sampling this in order, savoured morceau by savoured morceau, “an extraordinary athanor of shades” being part of a deviously tactile description of the cockatrice model belonging to the man the narrator met. A forbidden description, I infer. I am intrigued even more by the man met and all his accoutrements.
From “I subscribed then –” to “…and if he would want to meet again.”
A tour of arcane periodical journals, some more serious than others.
Or more or less professionally printed. Leading to “a world quiet different to the everyday one, a mysterious unfathomable world,…”
At first I misread, in the small print, ‘unfathomable’ as ‘unfashionable.’ Both are true, and I try to blend a gestalt of traditional and avant garde in my own real-time reviews. The regular embodiment of periodical disprint.
Laced with found art in photographs, as also in this booklet.
From “The field lay at a slightly lower level…” to the end
“I knew the patterns of these miz-mazes to be complex, as I had seen diagrams of them, and I did not think his great-aunt’s rough sketch could be more than a rudimentary recollection,…”
Sharing the maze with this man I’d met, this person who I am or who I may not be as first person narrator, a maze itself, of self, as are the emotions shared when sharing a bottle of water, without his wiping the top after I had drunk from it. This is a megazanthus after all, an anthology of mazes and magazines. And a gazetteer of landmark horses, one possibly a landscape’s dragon abbas, or even, dare I say, a cockatrice. A sleight of gender.
This is prime Valentine.
“…I said, ‘I wonder what’s in the middle?’
‘We are,’ he replied,…”