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 
FUNERAL MARCH OF A MARIONETTE
“PLESE SPARE A COPER FOR THE GI!”
A revelation of atmosphere and poignancy, involving a shivery cold London by the Tate, names of painters, coppers as policemen and coins, the day before Guy Fawkes day amid early ‘fizz-works’, as two boy brothers straight out of Just William wheel their Guy or Gus in a soapcart, the boys eager for one sort of copper, not the other. But the poignancy and genuine shivers attach to why they call their Guy Gus. And the doubt as to its motive force! Unmissable. And I had missed it – till today in this book.
The Bad Lands
The next story I thought I remembered well from first reading it – in the sixties or early seventies – a story with its clinging atmosphere of ‘bad lands’ along a ‘queer road’ from the Norfolk coast after you have walked past a strange tower to a large solitary house that, I am now reminded, is called Fennington with a spinning-wheel seen inside it … a story that has genuinely haunted me ever since!
It is even more haunting than ‘Three Miles Up’ and it still is!
Re-haunting me now by this re-reading for the meagre remainder of my journey upon this earth….
***
“He had seen him pass the tower, strike the fatal gate in the slanting morning sun, and then dwindle up the winding path till he was no more than an intense, pathetic dot along that way of mystery.”
A man called OrmerOD — whose ‘dot’ is seen vanishing up the queer road from a township called Todd, past the tower to purge Fennington of evil — had been staying at a hotel in Todd, and now with his disappearing into a dot as the narrative Point-Of-View abruptly switches to a chap to whom Ormerod had spoken at the hotel and who stays behind at the hotel. Then Joan turns up. The rest of the plot you will need to read for yourself, and establish your own point of view upon how this story can thus infect you and/or re-infect you with a severe desolation of the spirit alongside a sense of the bad lands beyond Todd.
“He saw Joan talking very quickly to the manager of the hotel. She seemed to be developing a Point-of-View,…”
Sorry, just checked back. – it’s a ‘queer tower’ and an ‘inexplicable road’!
An old photo of me (from roughly the original time of reading) that someone has coincidentally exhumed today! I can’t remember ever seeing it before…
An important Ligottian work?
THE FIRING-CHAMBER (1962) by John Metcalfe
“How had the eternal goodness, infinitely compassionate, countenanced this outrage, this enormity that had no sense or justice? ‘People are dying in torment, somewhere, every instant.’ Yes, yes – he knew all that – ‘somewhere’ – but this was here. This had been different. The horror was laid at his doorstep.”
A churchman once called a ‘sadist’ by his wife, but their marriage has endured for many years, is thus shocked at his own God when a pottery worker in his parish is trapped in a firing-chamber as it was fired up by accident. A seared corpse and what he must have felt, so redolent of today’s fires! And our churchman becomes obsessed with this event, and we are taken on a most a powerful Ligottian journey from shock alongside his godly duties and then, via ‘inverse gloating’, toward empathy as an epiphany of exquisite pain as our so called sadist priest becomes the ultimate masochist, I guess, in his own lethal chamber.
An important literary work that I did not know existed till now, although the title seemed familiar. Perhaps I once read it years ago and then blocked it out. Now in later age to embrace it?
BEYONDARIL
“Back of the trite symptoms waited a heavier and daily mounting oppression, a brooding while as yet formless fear that caused him, through the lonely hours of darkness,…”
This is a fearful classic, and, dare I say, another ghost story as revelation for me. It concerns a man who stays at his London home in its own cul de sac…
Meanwhile this whole story echoes not only my own anxieties and sense of agoraphobia, but now encapsulates it in a terror at the prospect of the unknown place named in the title, “a steeple, stretch of garden or allotments, and slow-running stream”, to avoid reaching which place is an obsession alongside dreams of this threat and dread. His methods of avoiding encountering such a place are mainly not to go anywhere at all, but when he simply has to go away to Bristol for a family funeral…
I cannot divulge the ending of this work of gradual suspense and the pervasive fear of a place like The Bad Lands above. The Diablery found within Beyondaril? No?
MORTMAIN
“Everywhere, unlocatable, but going on around them ceaselessly, had become audible the secret, multitudinous ticking of the ooze.”
They keep on coming, relentless in their haunting, indeed another ‘Three Miles Up’ strength of a ‘bad lands’ haunting, here negotiating, in an intensely atmospheric cross of waters seemingly in England and Holland, a yacht and dinghy with one’s new wife Salome (Sally) who is a widow of Humphrey, a dead man whose incubus qualities, and giant moth collecting and female garb, dogs them, along with sinister Scriveners as erstwhile neighbours where Sally had lived with Humphrey, now stalking them through these waters on yawl or hulk or houseboat or even a dreamed-of ark, but whose are the empty bathing costumes hung up on their deck and upon which vessel? All these watercraft in themselves PREHENSILE, including the yacht on which Sally calls for herself to be locked up in the cabin by her husband in fear of what she might do. Don’t go there. Simply read it. Immerse yourself in it and then arise from the currents like a water vessel with a bone in its mouth. But above all, do please appreciate some of the descriptive writing here, masses of it, all of which is to die for.
Not sure why this novelette is not more well known. Or is it just me it has been kept back from, till now?
“The ruttling of water under the hull mimicked, absurdly, the labours of a host of tiny men, blindly yet feverishly at work; occasional faint tremors from the stern suggested that the yacht was snubbing at her anchor chain and that he ought to go and look.”
BRENNER’S BOY
“His insides, he imagined, felt like the insides of a dog baying the moon or howling at music – listening to whatever tune it was the old cow died of…”
I must have read this many years ago, but I could not recall how disturbingly Aickman-like it is, in fact, dare I say, a classic! This book is sure fazing me, bristling, as it does, with such gems of the sort of literature I love. And this book does not contain ‘The Smoking Leg’, the Metcalfe I remember most of all!
I will not here re-rehearse the way the ex Warrant officer met his erstwhile contentious Admiral, a man called Brenner, on a train full of the fug of smoke, and he also met the calf, yes, what I see implicitly as the calf of Admiral Brenner, or explicitly his son or even his daughter in some eyes that witness him or her (we can compare him to Humphrey’s intermittent ‘female garb’ above) — this being the calf of the cow that seems to share meaning with the cow in the nursery rhyme or the cow mentioned explicitly alongside what happened on Sutlej in 1898?! (The fact that the ex Warrant Officer’s wife was barren seems relevant, too?)
“The whole business bristled with improbabilities and contradictions.”
The River Sutlej or Justle? (To push; to drive; to force by running against; to jostle. To run or strike against each other; to encounter; to clash; to jostle.)
NATTERJACK AND NARK
I previously reviewed the next story as follows…
=======================================
nullimmortalis
I was long ago inspired by the next author’s The Smoking Leg and The Feasting Dead, regarding both of which works I now feel the need to revisit, but I can’t remember reading his Nightmare Jack before, although I probably did and have forgotten or made myself forget…
NIGHTMARE JACK by John Metcalfe
“Only in his little wicked eyes did the old, evil light yet creep and flicker, and the succulent sin seem still to well and ooze.”
“You of all men, you Nurse, you mother’s plague, you man-stealer!”
“It was something like vaccination, and ‘took’ better with some than others.”
This otherwise old-fashioned seeming Limehouse tale can only be read properly today in the light of recent events — a tale of evil and retribution and greed creeping and flickering back along with Chambers’ Yellow Sign of a seeping God (now stigmata on crooked cheeks and crazed by recurrent finger pointing) with East London smells and stretching stuckness of the headily atmospheric river, sheathed claws, crooks and neerdowells, their cursed rubies stolen from Burmah. And its importance as a prophetic work is now assured. Welcome or unwelcome as a catharsis, you must decide for yourself. The eponymous dying frizzled man behind the “locked door” and we grizzlers who crowd and listen to his eluded or elided words. The dreams that outlast covividly their own dreams’ dreams; Pongo the cat to symbolise ironically a yearned for loss of smell, the most evil of the evil men also ironically christened — by the eponymous natterjack or Nark — with the name Nurse. For God’s sake, don’t look behind you! This story points at you!, as you recall “windows drummed like blood against the brain.” That dry, brown face haunted and haunting, ‘giggling like a girl.’ This work surely outdoes even the insidious book of King in Yellow with, now, an otherwise inscrutable “mythos of the Web and Loaf, and the faded terror of the Triple Scum.” The rubies’ juice, those blood clots, making you describe your nightmares parrot fashion or like a schoolboy in rote.
“Save me; save me from their bloody Nark . . . The man ’oo speaks like a girl an’ smells like a goat . . . the cat ‘as . . .”
The full context of this review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/03/25/the-2nd-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories/
THE GREY HOUSE
“; could he, thought Hammond, by noticing the way in which his pencil had scrawled out at certain points, deduce the directions of the turns that the car had made as the notes were being written?”
Oh my goodness! This is a masterpiece that I am sure glad I have read by the skin of my teeth. From the wide panorama of South London, its viewer Hammond is snatched by a taxi with outside curtains to its windows and a tall shape of a driver, taken twice in recurrent reality, not in recurrent dream, to the eponymous house, and then a sharp change of point of view as his friend follows Hammond there by following red beads (not Hansel and Gretel crumbs) across the city…. and, alongside him, I reached possibly the most haunting scene in the whole of literature, no exaggeration! And with the immaculately written prose in which this is couched, I was genuinely staggered, if not dismayed by the short length of time that this ever-haunting monumental but brief story is likely actually to haunt me.
“ 66Z flickered a consequential scarlet.”
THE TUNNEL
“Humped half-asquat within the elbow of this gradual ascent,…”
John Metcalfe is the master of the crashing gear-change as narrative point-of-view. Read this book and see. He does it brilliantly. The optimal version of this is here as we follow, in increasing suspense, the obsessions and backstory of a prisoner as he spends years tunnelling — with all the torrid logistics one can imagine that such an activity entails — from his cell, beyond the prison wall, then upwards….pitifully Sisphyean or cathartically triumphant, it depends whom you believe. Whether an ‘intentional fallacy’ or an unreliable narrator, it is human existence itself.
THE DOUBLE ADMIRAL
“…Old chaps like me are set on in this way. Such poor old chaps.”
This tale of three old men in a boat approaching a mysterious island – a bishop, an admiral and a ‘psychist’ – is another to label as one of the Three Miles Up, The Bad Lands, MRJ’s A View from a Hill, Blackwood’s The Willows, Bowen-Aickman-de la Mare school of literature and in fact works perhaps even better than any of them in spite – or because – of some of its inner confusions stemming from the Metcalfe change of point-of-view syndrome …”a distinct waning or attenuation of personality.” One old chap empathised fully, whether it be dream, religion or madness as I sit here by the sea reading this story with its ‘vertigo of direction.’
So far this book has been an unmissable experience. Now on to…
THE FLYING TOWER
“…the follies or ‘nonsense towers,’ bizarre and grotesque, that stand out with something of the jovial inconsequence of madness upon the lonely cliff.”
This is more of a run-of-the-mill story, I think, though I did like the nonagenarian man called Silent, in the pub, amidst pipe smoke and quaffing, who was listening to it. I wish The Smoking Leg had been included instead of this one, but who knows, there may be a secret plan to the pattern in this book’s choice of Metcalfe stories not yet revealed. This story, unlike the others so far, suffered from a few minor typos. It did have some good atmospheric writing as well as a man’s leg in it which was floating in the sea, though!
THE FEASTING DEAD
“a kind of tiptoe ripening of something . . .”
This novelette set in the 1950s is the classic I remember it to be, although I could not remember many of its details till now, having first read it in the 1960s I think. It summons sheer terror as well as an insidious pervasive anxiety, and the suspense at the end of it is almost unbearable. I now see this work to be in mutual synergy with Walter de la Mare’s novella THE RETURN (reviewed recently here): a dead one feasting on a live one to exist at all, a Horla or Hawler, here crossing the channel between England and France, separating a father from a son.
I now see why the otherwise run-of-the-mill story above about explicit ‘nonsense towers’ preceded this one in the book, whether intentionally or not. As this novelette feeds on nonsense from a past death in a tower of a wing of a French chateau. ”But even nonsense can be dynamic.” (my italics), the ‘rinking sound of skates’, a dog called zizi and a shifting scarecrow, and a ‘miscarriage’ of reality as one train passes another in the same direction (see “the moment that strong sensation of contradictory motion that sometimes comes upon one in a train” in ‘The Double Admiral’ above, and the latter story’s ‘hour-glass of sand’ compared with The Feasting Dead’s equivalent ‘running sands’ of life passing from one being to another. )
The father’s son becomes a ‘wanling or changeling’ as the faceless, undefined ‘sans-nom’ latches on to him. There is far more to this work but I do not wish to become its own “Despoiler”. Suffice to say this novelette rounds off a major book as showcase of this author, rounds it off with more than just a masterpiece. It is the nightmare you always feared. It will feast on you, as it must have been doing on me all these years since I read it.
“The entire limb below the elbow was swollen and had a repulsive livid hue.” It is as if the father’s son had a corpse accruing within him. “…their chief weakness being in the wrists and wattles. Yellow above all they joy in, and a certain tint of bluish grey they do defy, wherefore, in extirpating them.” A consuming thing, a nonsense thing that is both “amorous and – and rapacious.” And IT hasn’t finished yet.
END