Des Lewis will be 77 years old on 18 January 2025
Those who have read these episodic brainstorming reviews of mine must know they are very personal — rough-shod and spontaneous. Synchronicity and anagram mixed. I know they are not professional, never potentially publishable other than in the madness of my head, but I do hope they show grains of dark truth and cosmic panache.
These Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews were founded in 2008.
‘What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page? What do you think? Well now, I’ll tell you: E-L-B-O-W. Elbow.’ — THE SINGING DETECTIVE
“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare
To any current genre author I have reviewed before — if you have a new story recently published or soon to be published in a collection or anthology, you may have a review by me of the story that also showcases where it is published. See HERE. (This is because I am no longer well enough to review as many books as I once did.)
Fresh Fictions, free to read HERE.
No AI input in preparation of my texts whatsoever.
THE NEW NONSCENIC
Photos here: https://conezero.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/d-f-lewis-recent-photos-1/
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.”
BITTER, WITH A METALLIC AFTERTASTE
“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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