'The Weirdmonger' Real-Time Review
CONTINUED FROM HERE.
A Brief Visit To Bonnyville (1995)
“‘Which way in?’ asked the guide.”
You can ask that again! This is an ostensibly substantial story about a visit to the seaside, written, I recall, immediately after my move in 1994 to the seaside of North East Essex (where I was originally brought up in the Nineteen Fifties) - after living in a South London / Croydon no man’s land for 22 years as a Company Pensions expert. It turned out to be longer than a brief visit to the seaside, as I am still here!
The story is now too salacious for my taste and imponderable. But I am now just another reader. Not a very sympathetic one. It does have its enticing moments of conundrum and inscrutable vision, however. ‘Claura and the Gulls’ would have been a better title. In a strange way, it now strikes me as very Restoration Comedy with disguises and inferred asides and set-piece tableaux.
“At a point where two prayers cross.” (20 May 09)
Caretaker (1993)
Upon re-reading this recently (for reading aloud purposes on-line), I decided this was my favourite prose poem of all time and of all writers. But I have a very narrow definition of prose poem.
It tells of a communal gas oven where its caretaker operates inside it arranging for wool to be pulled over our eyes that it is a beauty parlour. And then wheeling my readers in. Haw Haw.
Treat both triumph and disaster as impostors – Kipling a‚? (20 May 09 - 2 hours later)
The Chaise Longue (1998)
I suddenly thought - I’ve been second-guessing an earlier self of mine above – and I should be reviewing each story in the cold light of today... as it appears on the page uncluttered by any memory of creating it.
This story then has a strange mixture of Pinteresque / Ivy Compton-Burnettesque dialogue as a misguided sticking-plaster for a relationship under ancient duress. Fustian to the nth degree. An experiment in re-coupling the de-coupled. With a sting in its tail. It does strike me as being a powerful scenario, splatting the fiction-reading-head with a de-boxed but still fully ripe wine-bag.
“...decked out in a floral print frock that hugged her bosom tightly enough for the nipples to show through even a heavy-duty brassiere.” (21 May 09)
The Christmas Angel (1995)
This, for me, is a DF Lewis classic. Quite perfect within his own then perceived terms. With the most pathos in any story’s ending that can be squeezed into Christmas Day’s start. Didactic about a then future credit crunch as well as free-wheelingly ‘l’art pour l’art’.
“Unfurling its sugar-glass wings, like silver spider-webs, it peered down with pearl-bead eyes at the piles of presents at the foot of the Tree.” (21 May 09 - 3 hours later)
Dark They Were And Empty-Eyed (1995)
An incantatory monologue of dungeon-dark buffet and pain, whereby the I plops from its socket, just as, indeed, many of this book’s story narrators nil out (pre-figuring the concept of Nemonymity in 2001?)
“... my own mind’s bony meat haven...” (22 May 09)
The Dead (1995)
A Joycean (I guess) dinner party, where items of furniture have finger-holes like ten-pin bowls – and prandial conversation has bizarre innuendo. There are skeleton girls and/or servants haunting the backdrop. It means far more than one would ever expect from that summary! Now after 14 years can I scratch more than just its surface. Also, this story’s Ligotti-like ending is the loosest ending, I feel, that has appeared at the end of any story – ever.
“There was silence, save for the wireless’s residual fidgets of warming down.” (22 May 09 - after 4 hours)
Dear Mum (1990)
A SF story in the form of a letter from a man on an exploratory spaceship to his Mum back on Earth. In hindsight, a sort of email. A bit like Dr Wormius opening the sash-window with his back?
It is potentially very good with a highly poignant ending but it’s not quite carried off, I feel.
“Apparently, immortality’s only half of it.” (23 May 09)
Digory Smalls (1989)
If it is possible at all for there to be an externally favourite or most well-known story by DFL, this possibly one of them. A master and his ‘disabled’ servant explore the interlocking attic-systems of a large house, with horrific and absurdic results. A family’s generations ooze back and forth over time...? An amorality tale. Fiction for fiction’s sake. It certainly remains startling, even to me!
“‘Come, Mister Smalls, no time for larks. We only have a few more attics to negotiate.’ He looked askance at me.” (23 May 09 - 2 hours later)
I am trying to summarise the stories real-time-reviewed so far ... in an ambition to match my own apparent success at identifying leit-motifs and gestalts when conducting such reviews on other writers’ books. So far I seem to have drawn a blank with ‘Weirdmonger’. Possibly, then, as an interim measure, we all have attic-systems to traverse towards our eventual heaven – heaven being, for me, an optimum thought that is one’s last thought before expiring. One needs to face the genuine monsters as well as the absurdities of existence: facing them out by absorbing them (but are you the parasite or them?), eventually becoming ‘the old man of the sea’ who perhaps takes on board one’s own internals like the experiences, illnesses, sadnesses, joys etc. of your previous selves (as well as taking on board, altruistically, externals like loved ones and you readers and, by so doing, their internals) along with oneself in the journey or quest for that optimum thought. (23 May 09 - another hour later)
CONTINUED FROM HERE
Dognahnyi (1991)
This is scatology as an incantatory and deeply-textured language of religion OR a blueprint for one of humanity’s sewer systems to work via the innards of various giant birds...
Internals and externals in symbiosis.
A tripartite war between life and death and the insidious state that is not really either.
“...it had inserted its sting in his crookback, thus putting down roots towards what it considered to be its sexgoal; the throbbing mush of the host’s heart.” (24 May 09)
Effervescent (1995)
“It was as if the truest reality was within herself, which it was her duty to release, for the benefit of others. In return, they gave her the sweet distillations of themselves.”
That seems to bear out my first attempt at a leit-motif for the hindsight of this book so far.
This story, too, seems to be far better than I remember it to be. A commune with some participants lacking sense as well as senses. The Dinner Man... A police raid. There seem to be inner truths here galore. A story that needs to be worn ... and visualised, too, as if you were in the story yourself as a blind person.
“Raspberryade was a euphemism...”
“Twilight often summoned stragglers from their late-lyings, who subsisted simply because they’d forgotten to die.”
“The law didn’t like late-risers.”
“...her tongue was almost a second soul. She even could taste with the ends of her teeth.” (24 May 09 - 2 hours later)
Egnis (1995)
Just for the record, this was the one story I wrote a number of years before I started seriously writing and submitting stories in 1986 in which year I had my first story published (‘Padgett Weggs’ – that also appears later in this ‘Weirdmonger’ book).
‘Egnis’ is a strange story, to say the least. About John Egnis staying with his two aunts by a lake resort, his family of wife and children elsewhere, some loose connections with Pepys’ diary, drug smugglers, and guilt – and some really passionate prose that I recall (self-intentionally!) was painfully carved out in the raw old days before I got into my writing rhythm.
Re-reading it coldly today, I sense it is about the ‘internals’ and ‘externals’ of character within a Trojan Horse as part and parcel in a quest for a ‘literary’ meaning more meaningful than the reality it reflects.
“...in an unsubtle little girl way, as she tried to sleep, as she tried to recall the face of her father, as she finally succumbed to the same sleep her father slept, without dream or hope of waking.” (24 May 09 - another 2 hours later)
Encounters With Terror (1995)
A man’s rite of passage from childhood, denoting his various encounters with Terror, ever drawn back to a ‘present moment’ of being caught short in bed during the Nursery Night. Yearning for a Proustian mother’s kiss ...plus a crush on a servant girl. Paralleled by his toy clock-work train going in circles ... a tripartite war of life and death and something that is neither - as echoed beyond and within this book’s context. Many of these stories suffer from their shortness of the writer’s breath... A question of taste.
“The corpse of the soldier Francis had just killed groaned in death as if it were a fitful nightmare he sleeped. The belly gaped upon wriggling innards as if these were new sexual organs the corpse wanted to be fondled and loved.” (25 May 09)
Find Mine (1998)
A letter to ‘you’ disguised as a story so that when it’s published its intended yet unknown recipient can read it. The ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ certainly come into play here. And a tripartite war between love and hate and something that is a combination of both.
As an aside, did you know that when you wake up tired and drained even after an apparently good night’s sleep that’s when you’ve been visited by a vampire who’s just had a party in your soul...
SPOILER: “So as to avoid readers of this letter skipping to its end, before reading it as a whole, I’ve decided to conceal my epistle’s valedictory in this particular paragraph.” (25 May 09 - 2 hours later)
First Sight (1995)
A flash fiction of a wink. An eye-patch, when hanging up, looks like a spider with all its legs running into one. Eyelid wing. And someone subsumed by self-harming upon discovering the nature of one’s identity as narrator.
“He revolved like a clown’s head on a seaside pier with a two-way neck...” (25 May 09 - another hour later)
'WEIRDMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW IS CONTINUED HERE.
