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GESTALT REAL-TIME REVIEWING
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Träumerei: Co-Vivid Dreaming
DFS LEWIS: Reading Aloud
Available DFL books: HERE
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). Work once in Stand, Iron, Panurge, Orbis, London Magazine….
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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The ultimate expression of Gluey Zenoism from an author who wrote The Demon Lover in one of the Aickman Fontana Ghost Books:
“‘I’ll tell you something, Clara. Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand? Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’ So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs. ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute. I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty. The ticking stops.”
From ‘The Inherited Clock’ (1944) by Elizabeth Bowen
MASK
The Ha of Ha above.
Late Labelling:
“Des Lewis obviously needs no presentation to the wayward fantasts. Even if I have enjoyed reading his fine volumes for Dan Watt’s press and the one for Chomu Press two volumes I recommend I feel like there is still space and reasons to discover D.F. Lewis. It is no easy feat to break Mr. Lewis’s Code. His work is constructed like a house, almost like a living mausoleum, according to his particular way of thinking. In other words: astonishing and uncomprehending. There is no key to this house, although there are a lot of doors. Everything is available, everything is waiting to be plucked but few dare knock at the door. Caution is good. Running away is even better. You don t read Des Lewis to understand and enjoy his works. That’s not the point. You read him because you have to believe in something, after all.” (EOP)
It is possible that I shall not be able to commence reading this until after any seasonal business!
CHINA by Ralph Robert Moore
“, and isn’t it strange we talk so often about childhood after fucking, he happened to mention digging a hole…”
Digging a whole hole, digging with others, or alone, digging across time or digging a chain of wholes between eras of his life, this story of Tim, a name that has “I” embedded and CHAIN and CHINA, too, has an “I” moving (the narrative changes inexplicably to first person from third person at one point for a while) in this strong novelette… about Tim’s relationship as a boy with his small sister and father, then with the women on reception, and finally with Jackie whose father acts like Trump. Jackie, who miscarries his child. Red ketchup on a pizza. And when I say this is strong, it sort of does things with my mind you wouldn’t credit, as perhaps I have just demonstrated. No way, meanwhile, that I can reconcile its perceived cruelties disguised as raging loyalties or laid-bare anger-tantrums, no way, that is, other than by becoming myself the person embedded in the ineluctable thrust of words describing him while reading them. His sister’s name was Kristi.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/ralph-robert-moore/
CORA by Steven Sheil
“She tried to keep away from the hole in the wall. Tried to tell herself that no good could come of it.”
I don’t think I have been so creeped out by a story since I read in an Aickman one about a horse moving about on a bedroom roof at night. This woman – whose character is made sufficiently clear when we witness her relationship with the checkout girl at the local shop – has had various next-door neighbours over the years whom she can spy on via a secret hole in the wall, but when the family moves in with the eponymous little girl as one of their children, it becomes more than just loose change, but a monstrous settlement in full. Dare not tell you more as I don’t want to spoil the hole I looked through to read this story.
THE HOUSE OF Y by Joanna Parypinski
“, the black hole that will unmake us all;”
Y is a bifurcation of “I” or a self’s choice of forked roads, or it’s one half of “my” versus the other half as m for mother. With an irony of chromosomes, this work has a strong gothic prose depicting a sorority at a university that takes place when the academic terms are in abeyance. A white-clad ritual with the pent up secrets that the female narrator likens to those different secrets in the misty chants of a Catholic upbringing. Eventually, we see the sorority’s breasts revealed, and vice versa. A revelation that genuinely raises the readers’ eyebrows. A tale that tells of a womanly, womb-holed generation in rebellion against a previous generation’s inability to be ‘special’. Taken to such an extreme, even subsuming is preferable to consuming. X marks the spot, Y the hole to be dug there?
My previous two reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/joanna-parypinski/
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT PLACE by Giselle Leeb
“, twisting and turning in the hot, tight sleeping bag,…”
A remarkable vision of a nostalgia of a nostalgia, where a cyborg-human revisits the bland civilised mœurs of a 2018 country holiday campsite with ping pong table, neat borders and convenient conveniences, a place where we ‘pure humans’ once played at living. I dare not even adumbrate where this singular tourist’s journey with a ticket for such an experience takes you, for fear you will recognise your own future for what it once was, as you adjust your detachable eye (or “I”?) to look better through Sheil’s earlier crack or hole in the wall at your next door neighbours for real. Everybody knows that place. As you follow.
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/best-british-short-stories-2017/#comment-11712
THE FIFTH HORSEMAN by Nicholas Kaufmann
“…the opening at the end of the gun stared at him like an angry eye, a black hole into infinity.”
Blending the Moore with the Parypinski, a deity, like God, as a force for indifference or something far more significant? We are about to hear the answer, but is it hokum or a cosmic truth? This work gives a good impression of being the former. “It’s a ridiculous fiction, one you would hardly deem worthy of teaching in your literature class, but it was what […] wanted to hear.” Use ‘you’ to replace whatever was already in my square bracketed exegesis? Or is this work a disguise for something far more significant, something disarming you, something putting you off the scent with a merely workmanlike, if creditable, tale of university academic circles, sexual jealousy and other liaisons among the academics, a backstory or racial blackstory concerning police tactics, a mummified monster or god brought back from far off climes as part of an academic anthropology expedition, a horror that induces suicide…? “Were they connected or a coincidence?”
“Even I know God is bigger than a single book.”
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/black-static-63/#comment-12751
end of the fiction in this magazine