Posterity or Posterior

POSTERITY by Mark Samuels

“— ‘dark’, ‘strange’, ‘dust’, ‘weird’, ‘dead’, ‘night’, ‘ghost’, ‘shadow’, ‘horror’, ‘fear’ and ‘terror’.”

The settling dust of a writer’s legacy. A story of a woman airbrushing an author’s intentions to help maintain her critique upon him. A booksellers’ rest home in the no man’s land between city and countryside within sound of the M25 and high speed trains, a place where the writer lived till his degrading death, whereby she attacks the primary sources while herself being harassed by a TV detector van and the home’s warden switching her clothes and wizened child-like beasts lurking outside. And empirically, as I always do, I seek meaning and value from texts, and, other than it being mostly well-written, I am afraid I can find nothing else in this work, just as I can’t find anything in this my own review of it. So perhaps try harder…….
None of us are entitled to a legacy or posterity it seems, whatever we as writers try to do and mainly fail at.
I don’t know which is the more reactionary — being reactionary itself or being avant-garde/ transgressive?
And are intentions always faithful to the intentions themselves that one thinks one intends or to one’s misdirection of other people regarding the way they interpret such intentions?
Posterity or posterior? (The former stretches into the future, the latter behind?)
Vomit from the mouth or blood?
Meanwhile, as with Aickman’s constructively meaningless work, I do find this Samuels work has a tantalising meaning and value that last just as long as Zeno’s Paradox does during the woman’s struggling journey through this story’s storm.
I shall now erase my pencilled marginalia to this story upon which this review is based.
PS: Bulwer-Lytton happens to be mentioned in this story. And I hope my recent review of his famous story that Aickman chose for the Fontana Ghost series may be relevant in the context of the above: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/19/the-haunters-and-the-haunted/

My previous so-called reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/mark-samuels/

Full context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/06/infra-noir-2020/#comment-22375