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GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWING
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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)
ONE, TWO, THREE
“That there implement’s a de-beaking device. I can take the beaks off perhaps twenty chickens.”
So says one who sets Leonard Miller on his investigating path. Leonard is a teacher living in the more unconventional side of this real city in a world where its counterpart city might well be London, in a universe where London is fictional, I somehow sense. This city is already real to me, gaslit, Victorian-style, but beyond any considerations of fiction or reality, other than it naively exists somewhere and I see naivety here as a positive.
One of his girl pupils goes missing, a bloodstain on the carpet where she lived. Leonard seems to have a stain on his own past, provoking suspicions of those officially investigating the disappearance. Leonard takes things in his own hands to find the girl…
Already captivated to track, alongside him, the direction of the captive’s whereabouts, I feel I also am an unofficial investigator as reader of his reality.
FOUR, FIVE
“The other wall was taken up by a sideboard, upon which was arranged an ornate toy theatre featuring an assembly of peg actors.”
I feel snoopy, acting as if I am someone else, as I invisibly follow Leonard into the nicer more open areas outside the city, with his inveigling, as if an official investigator, into a large house and its part in the plot where another girl was abducted, still missing, half-presumed dead, other than what the spiritualists tell the parents she is still alive. A beautifully atmospheric bedroom decked by a small girl’s childhood accoutrements, and a similar bloodstain that the servants have hidden with a sideboard….and the label of a doll the girl left behind reveals the next path along this mystery…
I leave no spoilers behind in the plot, I hope.
SIX, SEVEN
“Listen, I’m not able to talk now. I’m expecting someone.”
Was that me? As the person describing – or reading the description of – Leonard’s meandering audit trail of a search. The nostalgic toyshop to which Leonard is first led has the exact reverse of my own door number as its address, I notice. And in this Dickensian atmosphere in an evocative world where Dickens has never existed, Leonard meets the witch-like Maggie in the pub opposite the toyshop, a pub where they have the strangest and most memorable of betting on creature fights… the topic of cannibalism as part of the thread of the missing children that is now addressed reminds me that Dickens’ Magwitch made cannibalistic references throughout the beginning of the Dickens book that was never written in this world where Leonard lives. The style of narration that I follow is both constructively naive and often plainspoken, with the intermittent seemingly conscious use of words that at first seem out of place, but this is clever because they strike just the right note IN HINDSIGHT, like the “languid” days of childhood. This book is disarming. Enfolding me in its pursuit of a murder or abduction mystery through an accreting world that only exists here thus to accrete, to the seemingly eventual exclusion of our own world. I continue to have great expectations.
EIGHT, NINE, TEN, ELEVEN
“It couldn’t be a coincidence.”
We now follow Leonard as events overtake him, his journey (via fiery recrimination of his interference in this audit trail of cause and effect), and our own in following him, spreading events wilder and more Gothic for our entertainment, including a journey by train to what can only be the equivalent benighted landscape as our own Essex estuary marshes where Magwitch himself was born from a fiction world’s own fiction, bloodline of Dickens’ dynasty and destiny, or so I read it, tentatively. All this amid an honest-to-goodness horror read with a torch below the covers in my brain’s own nostalgic dormitories of childhood. Reading horror beyond my naive ability to cope with. A penny dreadful, mingled with, say, an aura of Tanith Lee. Horror and hoped-for rescue into a later life of finite adulthood, not into the unnatural unhealthy immortality sought by villains and mad scientists. And visions, relished for their own sake, like the creature fight in the pub and the dollish hordes in the climax, allowing me to escape into old age through a re-experience of my own premature childhood reading of Dickens and of damsel rescues from the devil.
And now, for the first time, I shall read, as I ever do in my gestalt real-time reviews since 2008, any author’s notes that seem to follow, but whatever they say, I will not surely dare come back here to comment on them.
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Goodness me, just read the short notes by Stephen, and how can I expect you to believe me, but honestly and genuinely, I had NOT read these notes before finishing the novella itself and before writing the above review. Incredible! Probably one of the most incredible preternatural synchronicities in all my reviewing to date.
Even the quote about coincidence I happened to choose from Stephen’s text now takes on a new light !!!!
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/06/08/synchronicity-rampant/