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“The Nectar of Nightmares” © 2015 Craig Laurance Gidney Illustrations © 2015 Orion Zangara Previously published by Dim Shores, 2015
Whenever I real-time review this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
DES LEWIS GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWS – established 2008
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SWEET, WITH ACIDIC NOTES
“She loved it all: the music, the outfits, and most of all, the moment when the routine became effortless muscle memory.”
A disarming, dream-fateful tale of a young girl called Tori with still awakening knowledge of sexuality. Her dealings, during rehearsal of the Swan ballet, with Tchaikovsky played on a piano, with the ‘mad lady’ dance teacher, with her own family and co-dancers, and with the denizens of her dreams. The ‘muscle memory’ particularly took me, as if the final gestalt I seek is a learnt process like dancing, facing the non-innocent side of human relationships, and eventually when the gestalt is reached, you know there is nothing but you outside it…And nothing but you inside it, too? Sweet, with acidic notes.
SALT, WITH A FLORAL UNDERTONE
“, sweet and fizzy and somehow, purple-tasting.”
The Grey Boy comes to Silvia when she was young and she had crushes on other girls and he comes when she is older, her mistakes made, time’s orientation still uncertain, but he is unchanged, I guess. Turning the page after this haunting epochal tale, he comes to you, too. Seriously. Even without some substance to help. The substance is this story and its ever-tumescent objective-correlative. I guess his name wasn’t Tumnus, though.
The nectar of nightmares.
“The sky was purple-black and the moon was full. It was gorgeous.”
“Libraries used to be awesome places, temples full of scholars and bookworms devouring the written word in reverent silence.”
A down and out ex-Iraq veteran, I infer. Searching for a book on nightmares, to heal or at least explain his own. How about THIS book?
The ultimate hawling upon the I-Rack? Hawler is the alternative name for Erbil in Iraq, but I use it here in my own #GestaltRealTimeReviewing sense. Google if necessary. Erbil is Liber backwards. That library of books again.
“The church was called Clinic for the Hurt, and located in an old laundromat.”
I could not resist such quotes above and below. Haunt, hunt me forever, if I didn’t. Hope the author and publisher will forgive me.
“Behind an olive-green cactus, a half-nude boy peeked. The boy was grey as dust, skin, hair and eyes.”
So, that image in the book was for this story not the previous one, after all! Between the two stories. Fighting for Fuseli. Sounds like another place. The White Wyrak.
PALATE CLEANSING
“Then:
It heard. It saw. It felt. And, most importantly, It tasted.”
Palette, too. As there are tellingly no longer any corrupting colours perceptible in the brilliantly crafted images throughout this short book, images by Orion Zangara.
Tasted this book and became its nectar.
A short coda to the previous story. Its ‘palate cleansing’ ironic. ‘It’ as something hovering in the I-Rack’s vicinity like a vestigial mind belonging to me however much I fight against It being me. And It won’t go away. Like this book. Like the tumescence of Tumnus. Like this book’s “mess” of mes? And this coda’s young girl fresh from Narnia? Now accompanying a grown-up 18 year old self upon her own I-Rack? Nothing can shake off this book, nor Its infiltration of me.
(D.F. and C.S. sort of rhyme together when vocalised, but which one is me?)
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