Tag Archives: Nightjar Press

The Junction by Alison Moore

IMG_8341

NIGHTJAR PRESS 2024

My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/nightjar-press/ and of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/alison-moore/

WHEN I READ THIS PUBLICATION, MY THOUGHTS WILL APPEAR BELOW…

***

8 Feb 2024

There are hints of Mrs B in Neville, and vice versa, conveyed by the two new Nightjars that arrived with me yesterday, the other by Ian Critchley having just been reviewed HERE. Both might be SPOILT by my reviews. So beware, read carefully when you are reading behind others. The next story is just as haunting as the one before.

THE JUNCTION

“In yesterday’s clothes, he went downstairs, carrying the suitcase and the tin of shortbread.”

Paul has no fault in the car accident, as he returns, Aickman-like via a sort of stranding by ‘hospice’ care, where Neville’s hospice is more a hospitable refuge on a moor than a death’s upsizing. And beware the dog, if not the cat. The car accident itself is caused by a stranger in a car called Neville via a shunt into Paul’s rear, an event that has no overly odd hints of anything sexual, but seems simply to be a compressing of boxes or containers, a crumbling (the shortbread, and a  later dessert crumble, and the explicit crumbling of the cars themselves and Paul’s thoughts of their un-crumbling into wholes again) as Paul returns from Paris and a broken engagement to Paula, whom he often told to ‘slow down’, and now Paul is being faced in the middle of nowhere with a delay, there being no pick-up truck’s arrival, everything delayed  by many sweetly mentioned sloes? The Zeno’s Paradox syndrome of Aickman that I have long since discovered, half of a half of a half forever, never to return to Mother. 

After diversion, the screech and skid upon this story’s explicit ‘moor’…

IMG_8348

Removals by Ian Critchley

IMG_8340

NIGHTJAR PRESS 2024

My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/nightjar-press/

WHEN I READ THIS PUBLICATION, MY THOUGHTS WILL APPEAR BELOW…

***

8 Feb 2024

BEWARE SPOILERS, so my heartfelt desire is that you read the story before reading my review of it, which perhaps makes a mockery of doing a review at all!

“We’ll be out of here in no time.”

A tale of two stony-broke likely-lads, one lad leading the other lad, doing odd jobs, this one overly odd, I guess, where they do such a removal job for a very short lady called Mrs B with her downsizing for death, which, as it happens, I have been doing for the last year or two. I honestly posted the above photo before reading this story. Except what is inside the actual boxes in this story seem likely to be ghosts or the boxes themselves are ghosts, judging by their self-perpetuation in all weathers. I shall be haunted by boxes forever now.

The heavy rain dripping off the boxes as if they were individual Arks:

IMG_8347

Later postscript: My review of the accompanying Nightjar by Alison Moore HERE.

GUEST by Françoise Harvey

2278EE98-2BD2-4871-A2E6-BB0CAFCEAB2E

NIGHTJAR PRESS 2022: my previous reviews of this publisher HERE

***

(POSSIBLE SPOILERS OR TANGENTS)

“I elbow him. ‘So what do we do now?’ I ask.”

This example  of my beloved ‘elbow’ moments in literature has given me a most defining pang. What do we do, now that this latest spray or spate of daily Nightjars is complete? This one is an adeptly haunting  culmination, however, with an aura insidiously of the hotel hospitality and car travelling deployed in yesterday’s Nightjar HERE. In fact this one contains what surely must be the Platonic Form of a disarmingly off-putting, off-key hotel, with, for example, a ‘grim grim grim’ bathroom, and involving literally an off-key doorcard for the room with a distant on-key piano sound and the main woman protagonist  looking in a mirror wondering who she is! Perhaps she is a famous French songstress (“You speak French, right?”), a songstress with a similar name to the author, having seen a French bodice-ripper among the books on the hotel’s coffee tables? And the staff apologise unapologetically, even on one occasion apologetically to disarm you further.  With Zeno’s Paradox as a sensed backdrop to this couple arriving at a hotel to attend a wedding tomorrow after a slow mazy car journey… “The receptionist hurries towards us – or at least moves in a way that implies hurrying: jerking her shoulders and swinging her arms.” And a book structure that collapses (like my own disappointment at the current Nightjars ending?) All the cars in the car park are at mis-angled tangents within their spaces. And other  people whom the couple meet in the hotel, people who are going to the same wedding, are strangely recognisable as having been met before but also unrecognisable, all with a sense of threat. The wedding itself is airbrushed if not hidden under a mask of smudged mascara, but its aftermath with the guests going back to the hotel (in the hired London bus with streamers) is sprayed in various  mis-directions of spate and potential unforgettability. But which guest in GUEST was the eponymous one? Perhaps the story’s main guest who asked  the receptionist for a night jar to put under the bed, i.e. the reader who thought he was me!

“I don’t think I’m doing anything in the right order.”

***

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/francoise-harvey/

THE COUNTRY PUB by David Gaffney

0488362C-6F83-4847-8FDF-3B87EF2EC1F6

NIGHTJAR PRESS 2022 (my previous reviews of this publisher HERE)

“; the sandwich would be a bowl of liquid and the soup a block of compressed radish gel or something.”

I take my hat off to this story. And as with the man HERE in yesterday’s Nightjar, and now when freeze-framed we don’t really know if he’s dissolving or undissolving. This is a brilliantly sinister and often counterintuitively amusing  evocation of a man’s visit with his girl friend to Kendal to launch his graphic novel at a comic book festival, where things become wholly against the expectations  of treating themselves to uncustomary posher cuisine  and countrified inns with log fires — even the countryside itself is nightmarishly countrified! And so much more that happens after the frame’s margin  or a text’s semi-colon, with the subtle or unsubtle clue by sleight of writerly hand of ‘Einstein’ relativity inserted somewhere in the text alongside the static hugging of hello or of goodbye being as ambiguous as a non-existent ‘candlelit snug’! 

My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/david-gaffney/

THE DISSOLVING MAN by Douglas Thompson 

93DAC2C0-FDFF-4B62-9C1B-B00690A336EB

NIGHTJAR PRESS 2022 (my previous reviews of this publisher HERE)

“A colossus of Rhodes made of grey Meccano, all mad gantries and trusses and ladders.”

Honestly a major story for our times, from the narrative vantage point of that Glaswegian crane, as well as wearing all the threatening Done men merging or dissolving as one [resonating HERE].  “Thus, he hated himself. So, I am quite sure, did Hitler.” All those Bodgers, Trusses, Trumps and Stammerers…. A story here of a singular meddler who actively meddles himself into passive quarried manipulations. As perhaps we all vainly do.

“Nothing less, nothing more. Oil, the reason for all our endless meddlings in the Middle East.” 

And a merging or dissolving of all those political so-called leaders , as conveyed by this compelling story of a policeman coping with all the plots, conspiracies, deep states, as well as losing a dear wife by his desire for a woman meddler celebrated by the TV screen everyone watched. 

On a dissolvingly different  level this work is being spread over time’s history, and becomes a spookily memorable crime story of what our narrator sees as a crime-collusive  man dissolving and undissolving, not as a Wellsian Invisibility  but something far more complex and frightening as part and parcel of the crimes and corruption in a staggering portrayal of the physical city of Glasgow which needs to be read and have its tags tattooed inside you. And a highly believable self-portrait of the narrator  himself in a conjunction of vain tension  with such subsuming factors being factored in.

“We can only be sure of our existence in relation to others, how they reflect our light back.”

***

My many previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/douglas-thompson/