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/
TWO DEGREES OF FREEDOM by Simon Okotie
“…accommodating two wheels placed, one on each side, partially beneath that space to enable it to be propelled up a ramp…”
Together with its many angular geometric polygons, this five page work has the once unique honour or both defeating me and inspiring me in equal measure: a Kafkaesque agglomeration of finding the self as the lockdowned in a panoply of geometrical gropings, in marked combined contradistinction to and harmony with the front cover. Arriving at the same time through the same letterbox a few days ago, this work reached me in my own dwindling lockdown along with the two works HERE, works that it supplements and is supplemented by, in their task to express our interminable groping co-vivid state hopefully of yore. It also supplements — governed by the happily serendipitous fates of synchrony that have grown in power recently — another brief story, one by Oscar Wilde, that I happened by chance to read earlier this morning HERE! The secret of the title is thus out as we half-inch along the precisely eked out degrees of renewed freedom.
Sorry, I possibly meant polyhedrons, not polygons!
And “honour or” above should be “honour of”.
THE ELEVATOR by Imogen Reid
“…you lean into the cold metal, and the stench of disinfectant offends your olfactory nerve.”
…being better than the smell of urine in the lifts in a similar tower block that I somehow chose by chance to specifically mention in my real-time review HERE yesterday. That story is one which this five-and-half page story synchronously supplements and is supplemented by in their mix of danger from stalkers (whether, in their separate ways, such stalkers are old or young, real or ghostly, male or female, bloodily brutal or subtly inveigling), here actually sensed in the lift itself as a stylistically effective merging with the lockdown apartment wherefrom it comes or whereto it goes. Stylistically in tune, too, with the Kafkaesque gropings toward the self as input within the the same package of today’s instinctive covivid sentiments, good or bad, bad or good. ON & OFF, by turns. Whichever the case, all four works do contribute to the new gestalt, in their separate standalone ways. This particular work’s wheel being of “propeller-like blades sweeping…”, this time sweeping around you whatever smell you can manage to smell, be it disinfectant or urine.