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 Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
STOCK by Cynan Jones
“He used to think the sun rose because the birds called to it, sang it up.”
This is linking through a madman’s eyes, or a man turned mad by the entropy of the times in his Under Milk Wood enclave, with the diseases of ewes or of ourselves, Nan in a sheltered home with casters on her table, and him squinting through a telescope like a voyeur – at whom? His own car barely past the prattle, and other vehicles that seem to gurn. Or gun. All in staccato breaths of meaning by dint of sentences often shorter than others. And why does he wear balaclava, if not for highway robbery? Which brings me back to his linking, oxtail soup and oxtail bile when bursting ewe scabs, taking stock, sheep stock, and a gun stock. Paranoia. Police. Pineapples as tree cones or with puckered knuckles or upside down. And his toy human figures larger than the vehicles they use, a memory he uses when stopping other ‘toyish’ delivery vans for their tinned comestibles et al. Made me think of a toy town and the approaching disablement of self, failed my MOT but still managing to use or mis-use the body and the mind inside it. Reading this.
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/6-shorts-2013/#comment-13484
DEATH COOKIES by Jean Sprackland
“He came from country stock, was strong and hardworking, would split logs all afternoon whatever the weather.”
Possibly the most suspenseful, wrenching reading-experiences with referred pain of exquisite proportions via arguably joyful hysteria. Echoing the ewe stock in the previous story above, and a similar linking exegesis, the linking here of the wrenching pain and another wrenched van! And the whiskey needed to dull the writhing scrimmage of childbirth and induced anaesthetic clowning with the whisking down of a zip-pull, ‘Bisected’, it said. A ‘neat halving’ like the story’s defiant Zeno’s Paradox of an ending. After the equal defiance and deviance of snow and ice besetting the usually taciturn husband’s wild dream of a sheep farm. His ‘intimacy problem’ become the ultimate gelden intimacy of all.
Death Cookies, accepted or not.
These reviews will continue here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/03/27/quadrilateral-nightjars-continued/
All four Nightjars published by Nightjar Press here: https://nightjarpress.weebly.com/