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/
HOLE by Robert Stone
“There was a sweet smell too. […] It was pudding-soft here.”
…the arguable sinkhole that has suddenly appeared in a man called Rice’s lawn, that is, and into which he has thrown household things like the kettle, perhaps keeping back his saucepan later to cook a rice pudding, and what happens is that I land in the hole with him and cannot get out of it again with my identity or reviewing métier intact even to say anything critical regarding this black hole of a story at all. I shall likely have nightmares tonight about my shortcomings in even saying nothing about it, having already uploaded these words of mine over a fence into the playing fields called cyberspace, before a hairy red ball like the head on the back cover bounces back. A cup of you and me. “…boiling out of him.”
“He thought that nothing cannot be real.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/robert-stone/
From the hairy red ball for a cricket bat above to different bats galore below and a sort of mansion on the edge of an encroaching sort of bog hole…
LET’S HANG OUT by Charlotte Turnbull
“Webbed fingers stitched the air.”
…and later the hair itself. This is the absorbingly mired story of two women, versed professionally in nature conservation on the moors, reminding me at one fleeting moment of my own recent roofless mansions, and of a recent synchronous reported political expletive here made polite as ‘bat faeces’. Bat faces, too, and the premonition, amidst such battery, of the women’s perceived madness as symbiolised by the expression ‘bats’ and by a series of artful premonitions of this work’s transformationally poignant ending that I felt coming with my own fingers in every sticky fibre of its text. Bells in the belfry, too. The hindsight thought of the eponymous T-shirt somehow made me want to weep. And then smile.