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weirdtongue
Sunday, 31 May 2009
CONTINUED FROM HERE
Salustrade (1993) Hmmm – actually, this over-long story is better than I remember it ... just! Perhaps Karl Edward Wagner did have a point after all when he chose it for ‘Year’s Best Horror Stories’. I have great respect for him and his fiction and his editorial work. Therefore, I shall hold fire on this story. Make your own mind up. I’ll just itemise the high points (for me) then: an assisted suicide beneath a pyramid of second-hand books, some apocalyptic visions and the language used to describe them, a strange relationship between a pair of twins (perhaps, paradoxically, the ultimate tripartite war!), Salustrade as the highly-strung, imp-like ‘gladiator’, the steampunk SF scenario under a gothic city and the Padgett Weggs finale. It’s perhaps that some of these high-points don’t make the grade as amenable jigsaw pieces! This story crams in so many DFL emblems it makes the task of this real-time review discovering the book’s audit trail of leit-motifs (leading to an eventual gestalt) either too difficult or too easy. Never in between.
“The books around her were nothing but memories, too – mere pages of live thoughts that were all but dead. How could the bone of one finger split into a ‘V’? For a book to live, though, must it not in fact become such a ‘V’?” (27 May 09 - 2 hours later)
Scaredy and Whitemouth (1994) This one seemed far better than I remembered. I remembered it as a pedestrian story of a blind girl called Aspen – and her two cats – and someone called David whom she visualised. It is about those things. But the ending came as a complete surprise and the innuendo of some people ‘seeing’ more things by feeling their way reminded me of various processes I’ve experienced when doing these real-time reviews. But that’s not the real reason. This was a story that genuinely touched me as if I’d never written it. The Narrator this time was not on a dimmer-switch, but I, imputed author become the unconnected reader, was dimming and brightening in a slow-motion strobe as if in some process that could only be envisioned by a real blind person. I almost could answer the question: who empathised with whom? Almost. [Perhaps one needs two people to try empathising mutually so as to allow a missing missing-wall to be found by a third party as a chink of light through which he or she can ‘read’ both parties far more clearly than they could even ‘read’ each other and themselves. A three-cornered dance ... or a tripartite war’s surrender or peace conference.] “Aspen had dreams in her sleep. Blindness couldn’t prevent that. She saw the places she visited during the day in precise detail, down to the assistant at the underwear shop with pitted face, toothbrush moustache and tape measure round his shoulders.” (27 May 09 - another 4 hours later)
The Scar Museum (1996) A somehow logical treatment of a protagonist who runs a Scar Museum and stays in hotels in Spa towns so as to cull as many potential exhibits as possible from the inhabitants – paralleled by a metaphor of life’s scars extending to real scars on the mind’s surface, a mind that can also be culled. It tells of his well-narrated encounter with two women and with a pig-like dog called Tussle. And there is a guest appearance by Padgett Weggs in his dosser role. It all makes eminent sense. And fits into a growing hypothesis that this collection is really a novel... Read as a separate story, it works, too. It makes unbelievability the new believability. Some strange expressions like ‘unworld-famous museum’ and ‘undesigner-rip in the jeans’ take this concept of against-the-grain truth into a realm of even weaker tissues of lie. (28 May 09)
Season of Lost Will (1991)
“Freda often thought out loud after her memory started to go. If she could but know where it was going, that might have helped.” This story has become devastating. When I first wrote it I was around 20 years younger than I am now, and it wasn’t quite so devastating to me then. It is a story of misunderstandings and memories as one grows older as a married couple. It cleverly centres round a mysterious Christmas Card that arrives every year. Time attenuates into a scar of its former condition. Which is best - to lose something or never to know you had it? Then slowly and unenthusiastically queuing behind crazy people for the emergency exit from life’s auditorium. “The great miracle about it all, he thought, was that people lived as if they were immortal, but knowing at the back of their mind all the time that one day, one unexpected day, they would pass on. That was God’s con trick. What made it more absurd God would never put in an appearance to have the last laugh.” (28 May 09 - 4 hours later)
Second Best (1993)
A densely word-packed flash fiction about Simple Simon and the Pieman and Jack the Giantkiller in a tripartite dream. A ‘bony-meat haven’ or a ‘slight ghost in the night hutch’ or ‘wishbone substance of shadow’? A question of philosophical identity. And just another piece to fit into the jiggery-pokery that is this book. “‘The only giants left to kill are ourselves.’ – Rachel Mildeyes.” (29 May 09)
'WEIRMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED HERE.
CONTINUED FROM HERE.
At this point, we are about halfway through this book.
A Selfish Strain (1998) A ‘dream of real air’ from a world under water? Well sort of. It’s a chunky prose piece “using words less understandable than the alien dialect once crated to Earth in the beaks of insane, if articulate, chickens”. It is about the cynical narrator’s son bringing home a girl friend (who is a bit like one of those Haw Haw creatures in ‘Caretaker’?) – with‘coral seas beyond the stocking-tops’. DFL stories are often frightening – not so much because they are always Horror stories – but because it’s frightening to think anyone could have written them! Or even wanted to. "High-faluting college talk, I called it. He needed his brains flushing out.” (29 May 09 - 2 hours later)
The Sun Setting (2003)
This is one of the few works that was first published in the ‘Weirdmonger’ book. Strangely, it is the only story that is out of alphabetical order (as you will see). Perhaps a red-herring in a ‘whodunnit’ or ‘isitreallyanovel?’ novel. It is also, I believe, the shortest piece in the book. About a lake (the lake in 'Egnis'?) A genuine prose poem, as opposed to a story. I shall break some more reviewing ground by making my review of this piece the whole piece itself from beginning to end:
“THE SUN SETTING
The lake was darker than the deepest sleep. I could still sense the horizon, though, while I or someone like me stood on the water’s edge: sensing that the tideless ripples were louder because it was night and there were less distractions. There were several others, awake or asleep, I wasn’t sure, who stood ranked along the edge: as if waiting for the glorious moment of waking or sunrise whichever came first. A sense of awe. A greater sense of suspense. A sense of sense. It was difficult to express even the simplest sense of all. Meanings lost touch with reality. Whilst thoughts regained reality piecemeal, during the process: a rim of screaming orange slowly worming across the already known horizon of utter darkness. Then the sun ineluctably inched upward, a slowworm, an inchworm, a wormhole of blinding iritis of the eye: sloe gin, searing cocktail of the senses, gingerly ratcheting into focus: half up now, almost three-quarters: as the lake became a sheen of fire; I or someone like me, almost fully awake, turned to see the other watchers of the lake, standing to attention, saluting the sun or, rather, shading their eyes from the sun with their hands: they could almost see the veins under the flesh by looking at the sun through themselves: I recognised one or two of the watchers: friends, relations, enemies even. There was not a single stranger. We were all bleary eyed, squinting, shambling, shuffling, a slow-motion locomotion nearer the lake’s edge, as if in some wildly lethargic attempt to summon the sun to ourselves, gathering it to our bosom. I or someone like me closed one eye. It was like winking. Acknowledging the presence of a life-giving force: after all, the sun gave us life, and we needed to return the favour. Exchange blessings with the most sacred powerhouse of God and Mystery. If God it were. Only representatives knew whom they represented. And the sun could not speak, could not be killed for the message it brought, could not accept blame or praise. Slowly now, far more slowly than we could imagine by wading through the margins of water with which the lake ruffled our bare feet towards its blistering furnace, the sun appeared to engorge as the horizon finally released its lower arc of corona. And nigh filled the sky. I or someone like me held hands with my neighbour, and he or someone like him took hold of his neighbour and she or someone like her took hold of her neighbour … as we walked deeper into the lake. And slowly, so very slowly, watched ourselves as our lives passed before our eyes as if we had actually lived such events in the course of some unspoken reality. The worm drowned. As heads inched beneath the silken smoothness of sparkling fire, it was as if each head was its own sun setting. Some of us or some people like us decided to linger to see the real thing.” (29 May 09 - another 30 minutes later) Shades of Emptiness (2003) First published in this book, this is a Joycean you-monologue (you being me) that ranges in quick-fire fashion between ‘identities’, historicities, house parties, slimefests, emptinesses... There are many strong visions and images and spectacular usages of language in this very long ‘story’. But do they cohere? Not to the present reader. This is the ugly face of ‘Weirdmonger’ – perhaps paralleling or symbolising the wider frustrations and eventual failure of those audit-trailers out there or of any seekers of leit-motif from within the whole book to make a gestalt.
“So, you determined to gate-crash and then gate-crash again. If a party was worth a party, it took you ten thousand years to reach its inner sanctum, where the action actually was.” (29 May 09 - another 90 minutes later) . The Shiftlings (1991) It is a story rather than a prose poem, but I surprisingly find it is shorter than ‘The Sun Setting’! It is a conversation of dreams and the reaching through hair towards the head itself. A wispy ghost story. We are all ghosts, perhaps. “But you must learn to sort out the straight bits first, or the middle will never come.” (29 May 09 - another 2 hours later)
Small Fry (2003)
First published in this book, this is my favourite DFL story ... where all the various DFLeries and DFLisms come together. It tells of an extended family in Wales, their associates in the TV world of the Sixties, the near-physical ghosts, the charade party games, the obliquities that (here at least) mean far more than any linear or straightforward devices can manage, the poignancies often touching upon absurdity or grotesqueness, the tripartite war of unsexual love, sexual love and irregular lust - all conveyed by a language that here works perfectly as a blend of dense texture and clarity, of poetry and prose.
“The magic times always seemed to be saved for a Sunday, when Father took us for views. His old jalopy took the steep winding roads in its stride. Up a Welsh hill, with our breaths snatched away, we gazed awestruck at the way God was able to make things so really big and high, as if He were showing off for the benefit of us small fry.”
‘Small Fry’ makes me want to question the word ‘weirdmonger’ that one of my children invented for me in the eighties. There is something constructively ambivalent about the word. As in this very story. Not destructive as it is in the actual story entitled ‘Weirdmonger’ later in this book. There is a difference between the Weirdmonger who writes these stories and the character who stole the name from the writer and used it as its name when the writer wasn’t looking and took it on and spoilt it and gave it a spurious ‘truth’. And, damn me, then I actually found it became the overall title of the whole book! (29 May 09 - another 2 hours later) . Small Talk (1994) “...filled with sinister back-to-back churches and tenebrous terraced steeples. Things with souls seemed to be loitering on the pavements like coffins of flesh, whose talk was so small, silent it was.”
This is a long story of a day trip by car from Croydon to Leeds and back again. It is based on the exact details of the real trip in 1988 to a SF Convention with another writer (called Gary in the story but not a Gary in real life) who was of course then much younger and unfamous. Interpolated between the outward trip and the return trip are a series of discrete (?) short stories that the driver (based on me) fictitiously told the passenger en route. Do these stories cohere and/or stand up as stories or act as reasonless ‘small talk’? Some of them concern car travel: full of every-day and grotesque and absurd images / visions (much like ‘Shades of Emptiness’ but here, I feel the format works better). It is a sort of mini ‘leit-motif to gestalt’ within a larger ‘leit-motif to gestalt’ of the ‘Weirdmonger’ book itself. Dolls within dolls. We nearly had a fatal accident on that real trip, I recall. Would the world have been a better place had that happened – to the two dolls rattled around inside like dice?
“‘Don’t turn left on Sydenham Road!’ he insisted, upon giving me directions back to Croydon. If he said it once, he said it a hundred times.” (30 May 09)
THE 'WEIRDMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED HERE
Posted by weirdtongue
at 1:54 PM BST
Sunday, 31 May 2009 - 8:10 PM BST
Name:
weirdtongue
Home Page:
http://weirdtongue.tripod.com
The Spigot and the Speechmark (1996)
We return to the world of an old couple as in ‘Season of Lost Will’ and the use of speechmarks as in ‘Rosewolf’. This story has a ‘snorting monster’ – if sat on a motorbike or on a lavatory.
I remember it getting good reviews when it first appeared in ‘Deathrealm’. But it gains even more power here in the context of this book, I find. Yet some have told me that many of my stories lose power by being in this book's sheer textual overpowering. Who is right?
Meanwhile, I find myself wishing to go back and edit all these stories. Even destroy them. Can’t do that with a book as easily as I can with all my other stories that I've spent some years posting on the Internet. Who knows what I may do when ‘I’ become like this story's two characters in real life. Not long to go, I guess. (30 May 09 - 7 hours later)
Sponge and China Tea (1989)
This was one of the eight stories by DFL that ended up either in ‘Best New Horror’ or ‘Year’s Best Horror Stories’ in the Nineties. DFL was, however, never really a Horror Story writer as such, but, as someone once said, he is a writer who writes in a genre of one. The big question is – does his work have an audience of one, too?
This story was first published in 1989 in the ‘Dagon’ DFL Special. It is about a daughter and mother, as the latter dies. A horrific, yes horrific, account of this relationship – and the arrival of an old school friend as a travelling salesman whose products bring ... hmmm, what shall we call it? ... scar tissue (cf. that in ‘The Scar Museum’). He also brings a variety of ‘small talk’ that borders on ‘pub talk’...!
A borderline Ghost Story, too. With marked DFLisms of style.
“The body wherein she lived toward the end had been little better than a wrinkled sack of rattling bones, which sometimes spoke up for itself with a voice I no longer recognised.” (31 May 09)
The Stories of Murkales: Twelve Zodiacal Tales (1987, 1988 – in separate issues of ‘Dagon’)
Re-reading this substantial mini-collection-within-a-collection reminds me that ‘Egnis’ was not the only story in ‘Weirdmonger’ representative of my much earlier writing times when I did not expect ever to be published.
These tales stem, I guess, from the late seventies or early eighties. The twelve tales – highly wrought, containing many astrological references, conveying a Biblical feel of (to coin a phrase) Baffles and Fables – are each representative of a Sign of the Zodiac. There is a strangely Arabic air, inter alia. And a scatological / eschatological feel that is emblematic of later work represented in this book. There seem to be astrological harmonics to which any chance reader of these tales should – the then ‘author-self’ surely hoped – slowly grow attuned. My present-self has severe doubts.
“Each. Sentence. Is. A. Word. In. Itself.” (31 May 09 - 4 hours later)
Stricken With Glee (1992)
A companion story to ‘The Christmas Angel’, with pathos and absurdity in symbiosis. There are back-stokers who live behind all the roaring fires in the large many-chimneyed house – living in tunnels and intermittently opening the backs of fires to throw on more coal. One of the protagonists (protagonists who sit desultorily in front of these many roaring fires to dissipate the aching cold) will need to dress up as Santa Claus on Christmas Eve and climb up on the roof to choose which chimney he will use...
Pity he has upset the back-stokers throughout the year!
That’s a story spoiler, by the way. But I love spoiling things –
These stories often work better if the readers fear the author they imagine behind them.
One consolation: the back-stokers are here brilliantly described and I will not quote anything for fear of spoiling your enjoyment even further.... (31 May 09 - another 3 hours later)
Monday, 1 June 2009 - 9:57 AM BST
Name:
"The Swing"
The Swing (1997)
This is, I’ve now decided, the perfect DFLism! It works on many levels – the ambition of a swing’s upswing – young love that matures (symbolically and sexually) into a ghostly future – the religionisation of life’s characters such as parents – the full blooming of the story’s swing-emblem into something or someone other...
This whole book is now firmly back on the upswing – having been on the downswing for a while...
There is also a subtly implied re-visit from ‘The Christmas Angel’.
“As they say, whilst human beings reach out for Heaven, angels die the other way". (1 June 09)
Monday, 1 June 2009 - 11:37 AM BST
Name:
"The Tallest King"
The Tallest King (1988)
This, I’m now reminded, is another pre-DFL DFL-story like ‘Egnis’ and ‘The Stories of Murkales’ written a number of years before the late eighties. This is in a simple style -- a fable or fantasy story of islanded communities that reach beyond themselves by the power of individuality.
It stirred the then much younger Mark Samuels to write in the next issue of the magazine where it was first published as follows: “The highlight of the issue was undeniably Des Lewis' beautiful little story, 'The Tallest King'. A wonderful faerie-tale told in perfectly child-like manner, and singing with the glory of descriptive prose. Really delightful. What a talent this fellow is.” :)
“There came a time when the tallest king in the city was a man of strong mind. When he first went up the stairs to the tallest room in the tallest palace in the whole city, he stood with amazement on his tallest chair, peering through the tallest window near the tallest roof, and gazed for the first time on...” (1 June 09 - 2 hours later)
Monday, 1 June 2009 - 8:51 PM BST
Name:
"Des"
Tentacles Across The Atlantic (The Story) (1996)
"GIMME GIMME GIMME!" Presumably labelled ‘the story’ to differentiate it from the regular non-fiction column of the same name that DFL wrote in ‘Deathrealm’ during the Nineties.
This is another very long monologue like ‘Shades of Emptiness’ – with some amazing separate images but, ultimately, non-synchromeshing. Or at least my present self so judges. The opening seaside scenario is, however, worth reading the whole book for alone ... perhaps.
This is one of the half-a-dozen similar unreviewable stories in this book under ‘S’ and ‘T’ in the alphabetical contents that make the whole book ultimately flawed, and predominantly why I have assumed it to have foundered since it was first published – despite the excellent production qualities of Prime Books and the stunning cover and internal design by Garry Nurrish. Or it is simply wishful thinking to believe that, given a different contents list, it wouldn’t have foundered in any event. A tentacle-tangled wreck on the ocean-bed of misbegotten literature.
“I will have shown Max my old marbles – the ones I played with at his age. I will have taught him their names: Big Red, Split Dark Blue, Blur Green, Spot Yellow, Thin Red, Big Green, Large Light Blue, Thick Red, Bubble Red...” (1 June 09 - another 3 hours later) The Terror of the Tomb (1992) This was a major re-write by a 1990 DFL self of something written by an earlier DFL self in the Sixties. Fundamentally, a sort of absurd horror story or a MR James pastiche or something more concupiscent between the two! It tells of someone investigating grave-robbing in a Sussex village and the subsuming of the Self. The village “had one long main street, where the pubs and bank-fronts huddled close to the gossip shop and the pork butcher’s. But, unlike other country communities, it had back streets and sunless alleys more fitting for a run-down city...” There is also a Fish Station “where those that can’t breathe in air end up for a while.” Not forgetting a pub: “Beneath the Sign of the Dogs that Whine
Their tongues and scissors flicker;
Within the inn there grows a skin,
And the stew is crusting thicker.” One would forgive neutral observers wondering if the pub was a cover-joint for another scar museum? (1 June 09 - another 4 hours later)
Tuesday, 2 June 2009 - 8:36 PM BST
Name:
"Des"
Todger’s Town (1999) A quilted story that is another of those long dubious ‘shades of emptiness’! Actually, this is a really strange one. It has all the hallmarks of early period DFL. Part of an erstwhileToilet Mythos, here we have a lavatory-man who “had worked man and boy as a stink-man: clearing the tanks of the rich and selling the produce to the poor.” Full of Lovecraftian references - and Cthulhu monsters roosting on the roofs of working-class ‘back-to-back’, ‘two-up-two-down’ and ‘tunnel-back’ houses, some of these houses with pretentiously overgrown porches sprouting from the front doors. Grovellings and Guttersnipes. And larger-than-life characters and anachronistic Christmases. There is also a terraced road of houses where the lavatory-chain flushes have been placed in the houses next door to the toilets they flush - and imagine the neighbourly squabbles ensuing...! It’s a hoot and a half! Not to everyone’s taste, no doubt. I earlier tried to wring out a leit-motif aiming at the optimum-last-thought-before-one-dies concept threading this whole book - and here we have just one example: “...his Mum told me he had died sitting on the lavatory-bowl. I actually received the impression from her that she was annoyed as she had only just finished his laundry. / I knew that Todger always liked to sit on the outside toilet for as long as possible, strumming his double bass. Quite a drawn-out affair, the only peace he got, I suppose. Lavatories were in his blood. I dropped a single rose into the bowl that had borne his end.” And if that is a spoiler, I apologise. (2 June 09)
Tuesday, 2 June 2009 - 9:39 PM BST
Name:
"Des"
Tom Rose (1991) This is nearly as long as my quilted stories. I remember being surprised (and very proud) when it was accepted by Alan Ross of ‘London Magazine’ for the London Magazine Anthology: ‘Signals’. It is one of my strongest, strangest stories that I have long since fallen out of love with. About a magician / drag artist performing in a women’s seminary – implicating bodily and religious concupiscence, ghosts that play the ‘Battleships’ game with the story’s protagonist, mixed with gentle unspoken love between two of the seminarists plus a richly textured, often irregular spirituality. The story is both poetic and grotesquely absurd. I now find it difficult to grasp. It is either my best story or my worst. Looking at it coldly today, I sense it to be on the brink of returning into my favour as a reader, but I continue to be wary of it as its author. Its sometimes beautiful, sometimes clumsy prose never ceases to surprise (even shock) me on each re-reading. I intend never to read it again after today. “The gaps in the text nagged at her, but before she could fill them in, she saw crouched shapes at the back of the hall, shifting in shadows. Like beached monsters trying to prime their dark flesh for easing back into the giant womb of death: as if they were foetuses of ghosts.” (2 June 09 - 2 hours later)
Wednesday, 3 June 2009 - 3:10 PM BST
Name:
"Des"
Top of an Angel’s Head (1996) Two dreams paralleling, feeding into and feeding from each other. One a liaison in a Hodgson-like ghost ship scenario. The other an affair of the same couple in a boudoir-scenario amid fairies. The result of this interweaving of images is one I cannot interpret or evaluate, merely describe. There are echoes of the human heads of previous stories in this book, some of which were smuggling ambergris. Also tissue like that on show at the Scar Museum. The story seems to be lending its own specific weight to some still slowly evolving gestalt... Is this collection a novel, after all? A rhetorical question in a rhetorical review. “She smiled and went to the side of the room where she had evidently left the breakfast tray. She brought it over and I breathed in the fragrance of rose-hip and hibiscus tea—on which floated blossoms—and delighted in the plateful of steaming rashers that—she told me—hid shy eggs beneath. A hunk of lightly toasted bread, with a skewer in its centre bearing black olives, floated like a full-masted raft in a basin of warm milk that was gradually growing a skin so cultured that it looked like the top of an angel's head.” (3 June 09)
Wednesday, 3 June 2009 - 3:40 PM BST
Name:
"Des"
Uncle Absolutely (1992) Another story that I’m told by some of my friends is their favourite one in the book. That sort of information from me should have no place in a review. But as I develop this review, I feel I should not withhold anything – as well as simultaneously trying to be objective. Meanwhile, this story is based on some of my childhood memories of living in the Essex seaside town of Walton-on-Naze between my birth in 1948 and 1955 when my parents with myself moved to Colchester. However, the Uncle character - who is so uncertain of himself that he answers everything with the ritual and incantatory use of the word ‘absolutely’ - is created specifically for this story. Everything else seems more or less real. The Uncle somehow makes it all seem even more real! The ending is poignant, a poignancy enhanced in the sense that it also proves words in this book are more important than the things they describe, thus working to make those same things seem more real as things ... if one can ride the rollercoaster-paradox embodied in that claim! And I too have a soft spot for this story. “A swing in the large garden which took its own volition from a ghost that was mugging up on childhood.” (3 June 09 - 2 hours later)
Wednesday, 3 June 2009 - 4:04 PM BST
Name:
"Des"
Valedictory (1993) An old man on an island (in a scenario and ethos similar to that of ‘Big Ship, Little Ship and Brown’) says goodbye to a girl for whom he has been guardian (her having reached puberty and thus unwise for her to remain with him, now collected by a galleon of strangers as if they had always been destined to arrive upon the very first striking of her clock of womanhood). Unrequited love and lush fantasies of tone. It suits the fading identity of the I-narrator as it ploughs through the plot of life towards its end, with the head-lease author (me) generally controlling the dimmer-switches (sometimes erratically up and down in ‘brightness’) of each story’s protagonist’s or narrator’s character and soul. “The oar-slaves abruptly took up crooning. Their shanties made me hide my eyes for fear of tears showing. These were songs of the soon to depart. To the knowing, each stanza told of the route and even the destination.” (3 June 09 - another hour later)
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