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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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MASK
The Ha of Ha above.
Late Labelling:
PAYMON’S TRIO by Colette de Curzon
“…and I hated as much as I admired the music I was rendering.”
My copy is numbered 42/200. The former number having the answer to all things?
On one level, an effectively disturbing supernatural classic tale of the old school, a new discovery after being written in the year when I was one year old and subsequently hidden away, judging by the genuine sounding information on the back cover of this aesthetic pamphlet.
It tells of a discovery by means of what I have long called ‘the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’. You look for for one book of which you have some knowledge in the real world but you find another book instead by accidental means, one you have not heard of and looking a tad old and ‘occult.’ It is a book where hidden away in its stuck down fly leaf is a music score for a classical trio for piano, violin and cello, so intriguing that you get your two male friends one by one – the third one being younger than you and your other friend and a bit more effeminate-faced – gradually, by accretive course of the seemingly autonomous plot, to play this score’s music oxymoron, instrument by instrument. With, as I say, disturbing results. Adept, on that level. Well worth reading for those who like the genre of strange stories.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS PLUS A WARNING:-
A hour or so before reading this story, I had synchronous cause to re-read and review here a story called ‘Winter’s Traces’ that first appeared in my edited/published Classical Music Horror Story Anthology in 2012. It explicitly tells, inter alios, of what it calls “The love that dare not speak and all that” in connection with autonomous earworms and the relationship of an old composer who had just died, and his younger long-term companion called Christopher. Having now researched, in the light of the de Curzon work, the name Paymon (Paimon) and his dromedary that appear as an image on the discovered music score, I seriously wonder if this recently discovered and Nightjar published story in itself that tells us of such recondite discoveries-within-discoveries is actually implying horrors that should not have been dared spoken of? Let alone released into the world or played, instrument by instrument, until all three instruments are being played in unison? Too late for me to worry.
THE AUTOMATON by David Wheldon
“‘Oh! Your hair! You need a hand-maid to brush it!’ said the impresario in his soft voice. ‘But please, Madame, make do with me.'”
The narrator is boy or youth, son of the theatre’s caretaker, a theatre called the Comedy, a name that somehow ironically is the perfect early 20th century name for the era that surrounds it (with the poignant irony I now transmute, as a result, into a re-interpretation of the de Curzon story’s attitude towards the sexual or social mores of its era as my own sort of artful literary chess perdu) – a world, here, almost steampunk, where the narrator is a go-between for messages addressed from social class to social class, from well-bred to pawn or peon. But, question, who reaps the benefit of businesses to which the pawns contribute more than the King or Queen, only to be decimated by the collateral checkmate of the Great War? The Automaton herself is entrancing and life-like beyond the fiction that here creates her. Anxious and fulfilling for future’s hindsight reader. Another stylish, deeply atmospheric work to match against the powers of preternatural fiction equally presented by similar methodical moves, instrument by instrument, in the de Curzon.
Perdus and zugzwangs set as mines.
As a possible cohering aside to both stories, my review of ZUGZWANG by Quentin S. Crisp: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2016/10/05/rule-dementia-by-quentin-s-crisp/#comment-8371