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Twitter: @DF_Lewis
Träumerei: Co-Vivid Dreaming
DFS LEWIS
Reviews linked for each year: 2008/9 – 2010 – 2011 – 2012 – 2013 – 2014 – 2015 – 2016 – 2017 – 2018 – 2019 – 2020
And Click: HERE for full Navigation, Stop Press & Backstory.
Available DFL books: HERE
All reviews linked for each of these years:
2008/9 – 2010 – 2011 – 2012 – 2013 – 2014 – 2015 – 2016 – 2017 – 2018 – 2019 – 2020
And Click: HERE for full Navigation, Stop Press & Backstory.
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).
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
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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