When I real-time review this book during 2018, my comments will appear in the thought stream below…
DES LEWIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWS – established 2008
A Constructive Congeries of the Conceits, Coincidences and Cross-References of Fiction — Please use the Search Box and ‘Navigation & Backstory’ link in the top pinned post.
“I’m never quite sure when I’m thinking aloud.”
36 pages, and a striking story that fully deserves this fine standalone printed setting for its presentation. Delighted I have found this work and that I have now read it within the realm of the twelve days of Christmas, although it will probably be even more disturbing when read outside of that realm! It is also the third day in a row that I have reviewed a work with a review that mentions either Artaud or the theatre of cruelties (and now the Marat-Sade) and I will never look again at an umbrella without thinking of this chapbook. Told as a letter to ‘you’, you put yourself in the feminine shoes of that ‘you’ and see the letter-writer as a storyteller manqué in this way, and you wonder whether you can put yourself in the letter-writer’s shoes after he was suspected by the police for killing the son with whom you were impregnated upon the corkscrew phallus he pretended was wielded not by him but by some crazy carving of Krampus before the baby in question was welted and sucked out through a flu-pipe (sic) leaving only the baby’s dummy, not that you want to know about the letter-writer’s erectile near-miss with Claudia when researching Krampus lore in post-Anschluss Austria whence his heritage derived… Do not NECESSARILY believe this review about certain aspects of the plot, a review which will not now be widened further for fear of spoilers, but DO believe what this review said earlier about the reviewer’s disturbance and delight at reading such an obliquely haunting work. The bundle of sticks, notwithstanding.