31 thoughts on “The Big-Headed People and Other Stories”

  1. The Orange Book:
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    The Eibonvale chapbook: 50 pages
    The first half of the title story was published in MARKED TO DIE (Snuggly Books 2016), the second half being brand new to the Eibonvale Press book.
    Other works:
    A Halo of Drizzle Around an Orange Street Lamp
    Thoughts and Themes
    Origami Shadows
    The Soft Tread

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  2. The blurb on chapbook cover:

    “The story missed a beat. It was sad. It never knew it could create such utter truth from such utter fantasy.”

    These stories of D. F. Lewis are deeply rooted in both horror and dreams, yet told in a way that maybe comes closest to ‘outsider art’. These works are dreamlike in a true sense of the term, capturing that feeling of portentous yet seemingly random shifts in narrative, state and environment with complete ease. The results are both subtly unnerving in ways few horror stories manage and also demonstrate the author’s unique writing style.

    This collection includes an expanded version of the title story plus four smaller pieces.

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  8. The title story is about my head, true, with added themes and variations. Francis is my middle name; I am genuinely an only child named after my Welsh Uncle Desmond who died in action during the second world war and my London East End Uncle Frank who died in 1980. My wife has a much smaller head than mine and so our two now grown-up children have normal sized heads. Otherwise, what is the story about? I do not know, other than it is very dumpty.

    The extra stories chosen by ‘Frightful Horrors’ are typical of my later work and I would welcome interpretations. Thoughts and Themes as nurtured by life in our current chalet bungalow at the seaside and by my stage in life when in a few days I am 70? And the sound of a future lung collapsing like a Circus big tent about to be moved on.

    I am more than delighted with the Eibonvale production. THANKS.

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  11. The Maroon Party

    A maroon-party is a picnic over several days, rather than the more usual single occasion spanning, say, a single afternoon. Old Dick had arranged this particular shindig for no obvious purpose: with several stellified ladies, buckets of sloshing trash-ice, slubberdegullions of the village performing pirouettes in pierrot costume, nigh birthless kids with their vanishing-fractions and shilling-dreadfuls, old men with fatty livers or waxy kidneys, geldable steeds, boning-sticks, cantilena-boxes, night-fossickers, lopping-shears, caged horny-winks, whirring orreries, two-seeded slowbacks, makeshift horse-hitching hooks and simple tablecloths. Of course, unlike an ordinary picnic, a maroon-party needed a focussed purpose. And settled weather. Old Dick had been watching the skies for several days now and, also, scrying a deer’s grallock and testing the warmth of tree-coffins near the village. The young maidens who were an important ingredient of the party’s festivities were prevented from bringing their umbrellas which would have tempted feckless fate – until one particularly comely wench winsomely suggested that they could pretend their parapluies were parasols.

    So, in short, one optimum day, when the dirt-beds were low and the dog-teeth retracted in the gums, the whole village, except Chuck Will’s widow, set off under a blazing star, past the brick-nogging works, through the frost-smoke of the eggery and, in drowsy-flighted ailerons of fancy, stuck their noses high in the air to avoid the foot-level cess-pipe clysters. They spent cherysshed days in water-bewitched jollity. Only one silly pierrot suffered a greenstick-fracture of his funny-bone and, yes, I nearly forgot, I fell into a donkey-drome rescuing a bespangled lady’s currish lopping-shears from a natural cess-pipe. They all laughed and pointed, called me cockle-brained. They claimed it served me right for crack-trysting little Ruth all those years ago, before she became Chuck Will’s wife. Old Dick then reeled off by rote a series of my vanishing-fraction liaisons with the fair sex and, it was then, I screeched NONE OF YER BIZNIZ! But I soon realised that the whole maroon-party was for my benefit or, rather, for my being strung up from horse-hitching hooks, for my dunking in the trash-ice, for my prodding by sunshades, for the ripping out of all my wires, for my stuffing with the loamy livers, for my being terror-smitten by the birthless childer, for my being cess-piped and clystered in grallock. And, oh, yes, lopped by the lady’s shears which I’d rescued from the donkey-drome (and then gelded by night-fossickers as belt-and-braces). I wish I’d stayed home in bed with a shilling-dreadful. Or, even, with Chuck Will’s widow.

    First published in ‘Ball Magazine’ 1993

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  22. nullimmortalis

    July 12, 2012 at 3:07 pm Edit

    Today’s quoted passage from THE GLASTONBURY ROMANCE (1933) by John Cowper Powys. This represents the first appearance of Geard: with a head like mine! But can one ‘own’ one’s head that is joined to the body. Don’t you only own things that need not be yours to own until you do own them?

    “Here there was a suspended gas-globe, and here the strangers turned, revealing the black bowler hat and hooked Roman nose of Mr. Owen Evans, and a broad-shouldered, rather fleshy individual, without any hat, whose grizzled head under that suspended light seemed to Sam the largest human head he had ever seen. It was the head of a hydrocephalic dwarf; but in other respects its owner was not dwarfish. In other respects its owner had the normally plump, rather unpleasantly plump figure of any well-to-do-man, whose back has never been bent nor his muscles hardened by the diurnal heroism of manual labour.”

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  26. Pingback: Frankie and Desmond’s Soft Tread of Origami Shadows within a Halo of Drizzle | DES LEWIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWS

  27. From here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2828149749?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

    “I am enraptured with this book, with its tone and surprising turns, and a world where things stand beside themselves to be noted and assessed. The first and last stories are particularly fine, though this is a small book and all the stories have a new voice,a new vision, a strangely compelling assumption of oddness that made me feel full of wonder. Highly recommended.” – Karen Heuler

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