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 
My previous review in 2019 of the first story is reproduced below…
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THE DEBUTANTE by Leonora Carrington
“I cannot eat anymore; the two feet are left, but if you have a little bag I will eat them later in the day.”
Swift’s Modest Proposal seems to be in my mind today, and Swift himself is mentioned towards the end of this two page story. As a sledgehammer to crack a nut, a hyena from the zoo dresses up, complete with garnered human face, to replace a girl who hates dinner parties in her own honour. Reminds me of Clarice Lispector, too, in keeping with gestalt leaps of imagination from Mexico to Brazil.
THE HOUSE OF FEAR
Entirely incapable of being summarised, this brief story makes me swing my tail to the rhythm of one song and bang my hooves to a different one, as I read in it about the nature of Fear and of much else that could follow but…
THE OVAL LADY
“…’We are all horses!’”
It is as if these Carrington miniatures have been waiting to pounce on me, straight out of Barthelme or a deadpan version of a surreal Elizabeth Bowen and even out of my own recent miniatures, now here with an edge of absurd extrapolation taking us into realms of an equally absurd truth, as we enter this narrow tall house where there is a tall lady called Lucretia with a pheasant feather who talks of her father, a house that is a sort of high and oval ‘stately home’ inside and Lucretia is an equally tall and oval adolescent in this mansion, a place I may deem to be a Whovian Talldis. Not even its roof could keep the screams trapped when she is punished upstairs for pretending to be horse, as I infer from what the feather later told me. I heard the screams downstairs, too, as if inside myself — my last animal instinct of an inference. Does ‘oval’ mean egg-shaped?
THE ROYAL SUMMONS
“I nearly saved my poor husband from his last attack of bronchitis by knitting him a waistcoat.”
These stories are off- and on-putting in a great way, with open-ended obliquities at each turn, even after the story has ended. This is the summons for the female narrator to the Queen to act as her representative at cabinet with the Prime Minister, but her car is buried to help grow mushrooms by the chauffeur so she has to travel by horse and cart, and ends up, via a domino rally, being drafted into assassinating the Queen by throwing her to the lions, because she had gone mad. But who had gone mad? Me, apparently. Lewis, writing reviews in the library’s only carrel.
“…she fed all her horses on jam.”
A MAN IN LOVE
“No doubt she is dead, but the warmth remains.”
A story of a girl, after stealing a melon from a fruit seller, has to listen to his absurd life story — involving a crone with a head on a string, foxes and wolves as landlords — as the thief’s forfeit. And then to see his dear lover Agnes dead for many years but still warm enough to incubate eggs cetera. Agnes now triggered by Melon, mangonels from mélanges, we shall still never obtain the trebuchet of truth.
UNCLE SAM CARRINGTON
A talking horse and fighting vulgar vegetables, and a young lady is counselled by two lady dowagers when she is lost in an uncountable forest of trees about her aunt and uncle always having an embarrassing laughter attack at sunset and at full moon respectively. Merely that. Makes sense if you try. But it matters little whether it did or didn’t mean anything as you fall in an open-ended hole as an ending. Perhaps the secret is that ‘morningstar’ can be formed from the letters of Sam Carrington.
AS THEY RODE ALONG THE EDGE
“; cushions made of millions of black mice biting one another — when the blessed buttocks were elsewhere.”
Here the author is riding along the edge between automatic writing and deliberate ratiocination, as we follow Virginia Fur riding her Wheel while her hundred black and yellow cats stayed at home, then with her being importuned by Saint Alexander in his concrete underwear and a big wild boar called Igname, while two chatty ladies decide to stay off at a convent, and all strands of the ‘plot’ eventually come together as if we have also been riding Virginia’s Wheel. Just noticed Igname is an anagram of enigma. Nobody has noticed this before, it seems.
THESE REVIEWS CONTINUE HERE: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/leonora-carrington/