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/
The UK drought of 1976 is mentioned in this Insole story when the protagonist was 16, but, in that year, I was as old as I look within the above painting that I have now discovered is by John Caple.
About a foot by half a foot, this gratuitously sturdy and mind-bogglingly larger-than-life book, has about twenty pages, but I hesitate to call them pages as they are more like book covers in themselves, a handful of them completely and stiflingly and engulfingly black, between two even thicker (real) book covers, all of it textured, upholstered and built to Mount Abraxas’ steepest ever standards. The Colin Insole work itself, in large print, is ensouled within pages 5 to 16. (Click long rectangle above to see me seeing you!)
salt flowers from the years of drought
by Colin Insole
“Outlines of great palaces and temples, seemed like smashed watermarks.”
In telling contrast to this book’s overwhelming sturdiness! So, perhaps not gratuitously built, after all!
The story of George Quarrendon, a story worthy – by a million mental and spiritual resonances if not by a singular sturdy story’s plot – of the magnificent canon of Colin Insole stories. The salt marshes near where I live, well maybe, but certainly salt marshes somewhere! George in 2006 dabbles with diableries of the past, the 1976 drought, cricket on a cricket green near the churchyard, plants that grew from the rubble of the London Blitz, from the Hiroshima bomb, plus a doctor’s now prophetic and telling reference to an epidemic and a curse’s cures that might or might not work, cures that include a red flower that grows in salt and ash. A flower that haunts this story. The painting of Goliath, notwithstanding. And much more.
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