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 KEEPER by David Rudkin
This has the honour or both defeating me and inspiring me in equal measure: a Kafkaesque agglomeration of finding the self as the keeper in a panoply of visually tactile gropings, a reading experience that astonishingly was in tune (as is this publication’s front cover!) with a whole series of photographs of something I never suspected —
because of lockdown — was being built near to where I live, photos that I took by chance, because of a blood test appointment, this morning *before* reading this lighthouse tantalising work, The wheelhouse incarnate, telescoped into a new Eye. It MADE this story work in ways the author never intended. Or perhaps he did! (More photos I took here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2021/05/05/the-new-clacton-eye/) This is probably my most incredible experience while gestalt real time reviewing.
The next day, this is cross-referenced with what arrived at my lockdown in the same package here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/two-degrees-of-freedom-simon-okotic-the-elevator-imogen-reid/#comment-21648
Sorry, “honour or” above should be “honour of.”
Pingback: The New Clacton Eye! | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
…and, so, attempting to centre the self amid the recurrent clanking of such railings can be a sort of commutation…
TOWER BLOCK GHOST STORY by TSJ Harling
“I didn’t need the keys as I had foolishly left the door open. I wanted to feel better, in body and in mind, and both felt elusive. The move to this flat had been supposed to help improve my symptoms by lessening my commute time.”
…as if body and mind here in the tower block (where the lifts smelt of urine) were paralleled by a similar pairing of zooming contact streams between laptops’ webcams and that of a proper paranormal poltergeist’s haunting. I won’t divulge the nature of the fibromyalgic woman narrator’s haunting and what or whom spoke, via it, to her and for what reason of past hurt, but the work’s closing sentences, for me, clinch devastatingly what happens when the various spokes topically tangle and stop. At least the pain of whatever or whoever in her had been hurt or tethered by signature pain is now put in proper writing and filed, safe from any computer crash, I guess.
The next day, this is cross-referenced with what arrived at my lockdown in the same package here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/two-degrees-of-freedom-simon-okotic-the-elevator-imogen-reid/#comment-21648
And again! https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/two-degrees-of-freedom-simon-okotic-the-elevator-imogen-reid/#comment-21651
Both stories different long co-vividnesses of a post-Pharricide dream? (See also https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/08/08/pharricide-vincent-de-swarte/)
The lighthouse beam has already started its own wheel on cover above…
The four works here and here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/04/two-degrees-of-freedom-simon-okotic-the-elevator-imogen-reid/ receive their combined gestalt at the end of that link’s review.