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/
“It followed him, bump . . . bump . . . down the steps of the terrace.”
Only two bumps, until we realise the inevitable third bump is that of this story’s man himself, his leg bent backwards away from its foot. And the apple tree’s own hand crept towards him in the snow. Without an arm to send it? Just with an applewood yawn and stenchy waft, as well as an ironic buzz, I guess, to mock any modern, as yet uninvented, saw for common man to use, a saw that wouldn’t have snagged horribly on the bark with the similar stuttering uncertainty of early 1950s ‘central heating’, I guess.
Full of sagging bile and foully over-generous apple blossom, and apples with horribly mushy flesh, as apple tree is pitted against apple tree, symbolic of his once land girl sweetheart and his stifling wife.
All three of them dead.
Not a cosy Ghost story for Christmas, at all. A ghost story, though, nevertheless. Artfully laughing at the illustrative artwork made to decorate its words. A dark ghost story, one that pollutes and stifles any festivity, revolting against any chirpiness of the book that had been intended to complement it. With only a few earlier glimpses of happiness on a trip to Italy and in the Green Man pub. Darkness only works at its fullest and most endless slow-motion harvesting of itself when it has a tiny crop of hopes glinting within such darkness. And a ladder, of course, to try reach them.