DFL

In those far-off-the-wall days, resistant baffles were built within the inner-tubes of the tyres on bicycle wheels. And the spinning spokes were fantail-flanged to mimic fanblades.

Brian loved pedalling around, thus fanning the otherwise stagnant air in his wake. Summers, in those ancient boyish days, were not only quite endless but also steeped in what sensitive souls like Brian called 'atmospheric doldrums'. Indeed, the sky formed its own version of the Sargasso Sea, reflecting* the sun-scorched countryside through which Brian's bike travelled in a circle to and from his family home.

*Reflections that the sky's intrinsic blueness turned from bleached-yellow into weedy green.

==================================

The world then needed more fanblades at every turn, so Hadron Colliders of various sizes were built all over the land in the same way as wind farms were once built at sea. For many years, there has been one such wind farm opposite where I live. Now derelict as its fanblades no longer turn. Tangled-up as they are in the sky.

Today, at Summer's end, the pedalling silhouettes of various increasingly breathless Brians on bikes gently pedal along the aging horizon of my hopes and dreams.

Not off-the-wall so much, as off-the-earth.

“What counts are the tangible books on one's shelves, whatever the soon-to-be-forgotten chequered-history of their publication and distribution.”

The man who spoke carried a large old-fashioned suitcase, as battered-looking as himself, one with metal spring-loaded catches that could be fitted into the notched slots of each of two fastening contraptions with rather more difficulty than a quick getaway would have required. Or so I surmised. It looked to me as if this individual who called himself Brian couldn’t get himself away anywhere quickly whatever the emergency or the nature of his suitcase!
I imagined it had a number of elasticated pouches inside for compartmentalisation of its luggage load. But before I could speculate further, he continued with a non-sequitur:

“Everyone is the outcome of a patchwork of motives, deceptions, truths, honesty, falsehood, chance luck, deserving fortune... of Toynbeean challenge-and-response.”

He spelt out one of the words because I looked puzzled, before he continued: ”I think this fits in with any observation about adding one's own experience to the melting-pot of history. All reality is a sum of such experiences. Mine. Yours. And everyone who has experiences at all to tell. This is why the internet can be such a useful tool in pooling all such experiences towards the goal of solidifying reality. But, meanwhile, the books are what count. The people behind them sink back eventually into anonymity or rise up to fame, whether deserved or not. They just do. The books remain.”

This looked if it was a chance conversation between strangers much like that time-passing small-talk in which one often indulges when on a train journey. Except we were in the waiting-room, not yet on the train. It was late.

I replied: “I am with you regarding books, Brian. But the internet! I never know whether to resist it or embrace it. A part of me once used to wait for the postman in the same way as today it waits for the email inbox to open. There's no helping people like that part of me. Actually, most of me wants to escape that bit of me. But, there again, just because communication has been 'oiled' by electronics (just as it was 'oiled' by the printing press in the Middle Ages), why should we destroy it by walking away from it, as I am often sorely tempted to do, as the only means to escape it? Partial, moderate use of the internet is not an option. When things are so oiled it sort of oils you, too. Makes you a different person. And soon you will not be able to recognise that different person because that different person will be you. It’s Hell on earth. Walking away from the internet cannot now reverse that process. That's the frightening thing ... just like the Large Hadron Collider.”

That last reference of mine opened the floodgates. Brian mumbled of the collider being 'the fast-swirling of nightmare’s moat' – 'a crystallisation of candle-dreaming' - 'the erection of a last balcony like a sea-side pier where we all walk towards its end and one by one drop into the sea after waving at the waves'....

“Only yesterday (7 November 2009),” he continued, “there was a nemonymous tweeter escaped from the aviary at Cern Zoo that dropped a white pellet of beget bread into the collider causing it to overheat...”

The train seemed as if it would never come, its steam fried to a frizzle on its boiler, I imagined. Giving up hope, the waiting-room’s benches looked decidedly uncomfortable for sleeping on. But beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Never fear,” said Brian, “I have something for our heads.”

He tried to unfasten his suitcase.

The graveyard on the south side of my friend’s village was not immediately as unusual as he indicated it might be. I was only staying with him for the weekend, mainly to see the house he had bought in this new area where his job forced him to live. He was one of those friends who, over the years, became comfortable to visit, even though both of us weren’t exactly close. Indeed, I knew little about him, with us having met on a business course somewhere or other.

Friendships can be built on just a few chats in a pub about the women we fancied. Friendships, these days, needed to be grasped like nettles.

We continued to visit each other irregularly. His name was Brian. Mine, too. This was a coincidence that frequently made us both laugh as and when we met on each visit.

The graveyard was attached to a typical English country church, with a single tower and stunted gargoyles – a derelict air, even though Brian had told me it was still in use for parish worship. I was not struck by anything in particular other than, of course, the unkempt nature of the trees and shrubs and stumps and other natural growth. Nothing unusual, except...

Well, let me put it plainly, I was soon to discover that the gravestones themselves, although bearing names and dates from the distant past, looked as new as the day they had been planted in the ground. Scrubbed pristine stone, perfect un-eroded lettering, unchipped set-square edges...

I was astonished. I turned towards Brian so as to see if he was equally astonished. There was nothing dream-like about this anomaly – it was simply a fact.

Brian smiled.

“I was astonished the first time I came here, Brian, but now I’m used to it.”

He told me that others in the village claimed it was because of a freak weather microcosm that local experts had written about in Climatological Journals concerning the sheltered nature of the church and its grounds.

“But they look as if they were put here yesterday! This one has 1833 on it and the name’s chiselled letters are perfectly clean, and crisp.”

My voice revealed that I was somewhat shaken by what I had seen.

“This one is even more interesting,” said Brian, taking me to a headstone that included one of those stone pillows for the soul’s ‘eternal rest’. “Look at the edge of the stone. Its grain has chance faces you can imagine quite easily amid the natural patterns caused by geology.” Those were not his exact words, but I’ve naturally done my best to transcribe them.

I looked. He was quite correct. Some faces were as if a child had drawn them in a stylised fashion; others more complex. The weathering had not even touched them. In fact, I thought that if there had been any weathering, it may have etched the stone into even clearer faces ... or blotted them out altogether. I wasn’t sure which.

I laughed. I suddenly expected to turn round and spot a gravedigger with a wheelbarrow full of new headstones to replace old ones. Date for date, name for name.

Brian laughed, too, without evidently sharing my secret joke. How could he? He could not read my mind.

He said: “It’s as if time is in a state of constant flashback in this graveyard..”

I knew instinctively what he meant. Time as a retro-causality of inverse weathering. Those were never my exact thoughts. But hindsight is often wordier than the present moment.

Friends such as Brian and I could share a sort of ‘pub-talk’ of the spirit without ever really going to a pub together. There was indeed something off-the-wall about his theories. And mine.

Once upon a time, this graveyard was not a graveyard at all. Shorn or unplugged of all headstones.

One day, in the future, I, too, would share an unmarked grave with strangers.

I shook my head and examined the stone pillow while Brian watched and waited. Our evening constitutional together was no doubt soon to be at an end.

The pillow was rougher than it looked. With some considerable effort, I man-handled it from its embedded fixture in the cold earth and, beneath it, found a single white tooth.

Written today and first published here

=================
Edit: 7 Nov 09: A sequel: POWDERGHOST: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2009/11/07/

The streets were without corners, the roads without bends, and I was without any side whatsoever. No ulterior motive. No motive at all, in fact.

I was, as ever, seeking a single sign or recognition to prove that there could be no such sign or recognition in the first place, no sign or recognition in what I hoped to be a purposeless universe. A maze of missed opportunities, unfulfilled chances, forgotten paths, bricked-up entrances and exits ... and a stern frown that indicated no emotion at all. My own face taken at face value.

I saw a single candle in the window of the only window lit at all in a huge high-rise of ancient architecture. Although this was a city, I imagined myself to be exploring a flat terrain in a mystical world quite beyond the conceptual range of our world as I knew it. It was a shock, then, to be confronted with a high-rise block – reminding me of my own home beginnings in another city far away. I had expected skewed pyramids or other ill-wondered wonders of a world that could never be explained beyond its reality as a world.

The shock of vast ordinariness focussed greedily intowards that pinprick of faltering light from a sole window around which, in different flats, I supposed, thousands squatted in rank poverty. Only one family could afford a candle in their window? Rather that the other families were content with darkness.

A tower of flats, interleaved ... shuffled, re-shuffled, as Fate took its hand each day.

Just above the window with that eternal candleflame was another window, one with a dark balcony just discernible in the half-begrudged light of a fitful dusk that had grown several times into night and back again without the eventual foreseen success of even a despairing dawn.

I fell to the pavement, quickly retrieving the pillow from my rucksack. I positioned it behind my head in such a way that, for whatever reason, I could keep watch on the lonely candleflame ... expecting it to melt down to the very wick’s end. I could not afford to sleep off into dream in case I dreamed of a truly eternal candleflame that would betoken my death. I simply had to hang on to what I got.

If only I had raised my sights further uptowards the dark balcony for longer than just a nonce, I would have seen a shadowy figure standing there. The lost wonder of the world I had once hoped to become. The writer I could have been if I had been able to write him into existence .... scattering the leaves of his greatest book downtowards he who had failed to create it. In obeisance.

If any thus scattered were caught piecemeal by balcony below balcony....in random fashion ... I knew in my heart of hearts that there were still no leaves left as there were no leaves to leave.

The pillow was uncomfortable. A pyramid whose topmost point daggered intowards my brain.

written today and first published here

Written in August 2009:

A Candle Dream


I


I always had the same dream during that period of two weeks when staying with Sarah. It is a long story to tell you about Sarah and how I came into her life. Suffice to say, that I did not befriend Sarah for her large country house; I did not befriend Sarah for the regular sex that later ensued; I did not befriend Sarah for the comfort and confidence-building she provided as we talked into the late afternoons around a moment-in-time, an occasion that we happened simply to call ‘tea and biscuits’.

We often met in the wet streets of Colchester, visiting the cinema for unwanted, unwatched film matinees - flickering screens that seemed to wash over us - then eventually migrating to a cafe that kept open later than the others for our sessions of ‘tea and biscuits’. Neither of us crossed the line. We simply met, then unmet ... until we met again. A routine that was not recognised as a routine. A routine with no obvious end ... until, that is, out of the blue, Sarah invited me for a two week stay in her country house.

I record here – in the hope you may consider this tantamount to a legal document – that I did not spend those wet afternoons in Colchester meeting Sarah in our late middle-age for any other reason than that we had met at a book club and simply met again outside of the book club with no ulterior motive within each of us or no ulterior motive between us together. There was not even the motive of neutralising loneliness. In fact, Sarah never gave me the impression she was lonely at all. And she, I am confident, never received the impression from me that I was lonely. So it was not for that reason. Our meetings just were. The fact we called the core of each meeting ‘tea and biscuits’ seemed to relieve us of the necessity or duty of rationalising our relationship any further.

Our relationship changed, of course, following Sarah’s sudden invitation to me to visit her country house for a two week stay. In hindsight, that was not only the seed of the relationship’s growth but also the seed of its destruction. We should probably have left it at ‘tea and biscuits’.

It is a long story, too, about the circumstances of the recurring dream. It only started coming when first sleeping in the guest room at Sarah’s country house, a place I often visited just for various weekends after the initial much longer toe-in-the-water fortnight.

Suffice to say that most normal dreams – or normal dreams to which I at least am accustomed – feature flowing events, whether linear or non-linear, but certainly events, moving images, echoes of real life in recognisable if possibly mutated interaction, some echoes forgotten, others not. But, no, the dream in question was what I called a ‘candle dream’. Since then, I have heard of many people having candle dreams, once I admitted to those people about having candle dreams, i.e. once having had them during stays with Sarah, with whom, let it be said, I have since lost contact.

How many of you have had candle dreams?

You need to know what a candle dream is before being able to answer my question, I’m sure. Others may know candle dreams with different names. Let me tell you that a candle dream, in my understanding, can be also called a fixed-camera dream, a frozen dream (or, at least, near-frozen), an unwavering dream (even if the candleflame itself wavers), a static dream (even if it flickers slightly), a single-frame dream (even if the image imperceptibly strobes or, as they say in the trade, cart-wheels), a single-flame dream (even if there is an after-image of a flame burnt on the retina by the original flame).

Simply put, a candle dream is of a single candle with a slightly flickering flame (with or without a candlestick, but usually with an ornate candlestick), and your minimalist view of it is as a slightly unwavering, non-shortening candle-wax and, from within the dream, perceived to be alight for eternity. A fear of eternity within a dream, let me tell those of you who are unaware of this fact, is the greatest fear of all. In other words, a candle dream is not a nice dream to dream. It cannot really be called a nightmare, I suppose, because nightmares are traditionally never static, never single-frame, indeed never single-flame. Nightmares have monsters and obvious fears and mutant echoes of life. Many who dream candle dreams rarely have contact with lit candles in real life. Many who dream candle dreams never complain of having nightmares.

One never knows whether any particular candle dream is the last candle dream you will ever dream ... whether, indeed, the eternity you sense from within the dream is a real eternity or not.

Sarah once told me during our tea and biscuits in her drawing-room at the country house that if I could tell someone, like herself, about the dream, as I was then doing as part of our usual small talk, then that fact was proof positive I had escaped the eternity of the candle dream.

I suppose I should have insisted that we abandon the sex and return to just meeting in the wet streets of Colchester, visiting the cinema matinees and late-opening cafe as part of a routine that may, in hindsight, have lasted us for a good while, even until we both no longer needed or even wanted company. It is now strange, looking back on it all, how I never questioned, during our small talk, how our afternoons together were always so wet, with Colchester being in the driest part of the country.


II


There is a flickering light around me. Or I am the flickering light itself.


The conclusion eventually drawn is that I am the source of the flickering light. Stemming from this, either there is not enough light for me to be able to see the nature of myself as the light’s source or the angle of sight upon where I assume myself to be is beyond the power of my eyes to reach.


But what conclusion can I possibly draw? Uncertainty seems to be a separate power all on its own, shrouding my thoughts, curdling the light, altering fixity to something more wavering. Am I a single flame? Or many? Everlasting or expendable? A dream or a dreamer?


No sense of Being can possibly encompass the non-humanity I now feel, especially as I can only describe it in human terms A waxen stem? A church ornament? A stained-glass vision? A weakness of substance striving for incarnation?


Perhaps I am all these things and more. Suddenly, I feel myself stirred. Sweetened. Light’s spinning meniscus. Later dunked into. Even eternity needs a break for refreshment.


III

The man I saw was sleeping soundly. The context was oddly perfect: a bed in a bedroom belonging to a large country house, the view from the window being low almost flat hills, woodland, a ha-ha quite close and gardens even closer cultivated for paying visitors, once they had toured the house and its rooms.


I was one such visitor. At first I was unsure whether I had strayed into an area that was not open but, if so, how had that been possible? I had transgressed no ‘no entry’ signs nor other signs of non-admittance. Indeed, I remembered following direction arrows that I had no reason to distrust, signs saying ‘This Way’ or ‘To the Cafe’.


The bedroom was one which contained old furniture, with labels and other information, so I knew I was not astray. I must say the man almost looked to me as if he had been sleeping there for an eternity, bedded down and lain on his side by some caring person, I assumed. A nurse? A mother? A lover? He snored loudly, the only sound to break the silence that now seemed to have kept the other visitors at bay, because otherwise it had been a busy day for the house and I was eager to reach the cafe before it became overcrowded, as it was now raining, I could see through the window towards the gardens....


“He’s candle dreaming.”


I noticed a woman was standing beside me in the bedroom, having just spoken, not a visitor, I guessed, as she wore a badge saying ‘Essex Heritage’ who ran the House on the outskirts of Colchester, the oldest recorded town in Great Britain. I nodded, without trying to understand her words, as she led me gently by the hand towards the cafe for what she described as tea and biscuits.

CONTINUED FROM HERE: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cern_zoo__a_dfl_realtime_review.htm

See above for important context.

The Rude Man's Menagerie
This is an apocalyptic story deriving from the Chalk Giant thread weaving through this book as well as the Zoo one, where chalk drawings become a menagerie of creatures, comprising the female protagonist's touching (still conversational) relationship with her dead Dad and her righteous cause against the Rude Man drawing in the well-depicted landscape and the Rude Man's own tethered chalklings. One cannot do justice to the crop of joy and anguish intermingling so tellingly. It is a fictional rite of passage like none other, I suggest. One that will haunt you with chalk dreams. It does me.
Here, too, the Dead Speak again (as part of THEORY?): an added dimension I had not appreciated before. Or is this me hindsighting yet again? (18 Oct 09 - three hours later).

Window To The Soul
"'Welcome to CERN ZOO. We buy your unwanted memories,'..."
Another fable that deals with the core of this book, I feel. Today, even more so than I originally thought, with explicit reference to the Higgs particle itself so central to THEORY. Hindsight and pathos, exquisitely conveyed, with Alzheimers perhaps on some future horizon cone-zeroing back in on us through time... (18 Oct 09 - an hour later)

Salmon Widow
"...Sam: tall, boyish, sharp-of-nose and eyes full of tomorrow, she..."
This tour-de-force (literally!) -- well, it is tucked away in the Cern Zoo book and, like other stories here, deserves a wider readership. How can anyone go through life without, for example, reading 'Salmon Widow'? But it passes even under the radar of most of the reviews, too. Even (almost) under mine, other than to say: it is a swirling rich fishbone-marrow A.S. Byatt time-woven shoal of images and emotions and horrors and coincidences and 'Who Do You Think You Are?' with Kate Humble or David Mitchell or Marcel Beque or Prickle / Holly / Samantha... all conveying a real story-plot.
All I can really do is quote the actual writer of this story who has given me permission to quote here what he or she wrote to me when he or she heard about THEORY: "Salmon Widow's circular construction was not unmindful of Hadron. Similarly Marcel's snakebelt, that from some angles might be seen to eat itself. And remaining on the mournful: as you'll know, the Old English Cerne (hmm, from the Old French "dark circle") refers to a cairn or grave. Big Crunch theory suggests that we'll meet ourselves on the way back: the collision may or may not be pleasant."
This writer has also reviewed the whole CERN ZOO book (other than 'Salmon Widow') here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cern_zoo_review.htm
"Perhaps her husband had joined her..." (18 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later)

Pebbles
"...the clouds threatening a rain that had not yet come..."
A simply beautiful short tale of a girl collecting pink pebbles from a beach and the boy protagonist who met her. Ending with a dying fall that contains a poignant contentment at impossibility. It seems a shame to mould the meaning further than that. But did she really seek just one pebble, one particle of our existence? The story does not give the answer to that question because, I suppose, it does not ask it. (18 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

The Shadow’s Departure
A dark vision of Distraction, derelict Glass Factories, enticing madness... this is the Shadow of the Future that is tied to us all. Whether we reach full liberation from it is a knot or ligottum that few can untie. It is just that (and this is my thought and perhaps not the story’s) if the future speaks to us we are truly the Dead who Speak back to it.
In honour of this story, I have concocted a short waking-dream from its Synchronised Shards of Random Truth & Fiction, i.e. distilled from the prose in its first half (I dare not distil anything from its second half!):-
the secret life of broken glass
a shadow haunted sector that even the cranks and the closet cranks of academia dare not analyze
I secretly hoped to meet that one-in-a-million madman who clasped some shocking inner truth
the stupid whir of a trillion pointless devices (19 Oct 09)

Inspired by last entry above and by 'Salmon Widow': SHOALS (19 Oct 09 - an hour later)

Being Of Sound Mind
“...sending an attack of the vbvbvbv’s into a current opus.”
One of a number of stories in ‘Cern Zoo’ that I accepted and contracted without first knowing who wrote it – a writer who has since kindly given me much information on Time and Parallel Worlds and other philosophies that also perhaps underlie the Cern phenomenon. As does the story itself implicitly and explicitly.
An enthralling and touching and concept-provoking story of someone recently retired now taking fiction-writing more seriously, later facing a whispering then clamouring ‘political correctness’ after the sudden bubbly arrival of a mysterious ‘granddaughter’ manqué. This plot really blossoms even further in the (for me) new light of THEORY. I am so glad I spotted this memorable intarsia of ‘magic fiction’ before fully appreciating it as such. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

Dear Doctor
The girl on the cover suddenly has a pain in her stomach. Or on it. Incredibly, now, I find, in hindsight, this brief and (for me) hilarious joke letter to a doctor is the plainest example of the power of hindsight itself. This all seems to be in a synergy with THEORY that I, as editor, never foresaw. (19 Oct 09 - another hour later)

Mellie’s Zoo
“'I wish you were real,' she whispered.”
I just ended re-reading this story with tears in my eyes. It’s that kind of experience, especially today, in context. A tale of Mellie, a Child as Mother of Man – faced with a ‘lost domain’ Zoo beyond the woods we know, of memorable inward atmosphere, in company with other children (one boy as their internal ‘pied piper’). ‘David Almond’-like sensibilities are punctuated with visions of a metal bird and shadow-creatures (both in tune with ‘The Shadow's Departure’) and a Salmon ...
And a caged version of her own stuffed purple hippo at home...and much more. Extrapolating wildly in an uncaged way, I feel this is the Zoo of ‘The Lion’s Den’ version of future self in logical progression as transmuted and rusticated by its return journey come back to haunt itself with pathos as well as bathos. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)

THIS REVIEW IS NOW CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cern_zoo__a_dfl_realtime_review_part_3.htm

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“A pirate as a person or a group involves an element of illegality or at least a bending of the rules, does it not?”

It sounded more like a statement than a question. And a long way short of a chat-up line, I guess. He stared at me at the dark bar on the edge of a nowhere where, lost, cold and hungry, I had just left my car in its car park of no obvious allotted spaces.

Women on their own in such places must be a rare event, I continued to guess. I had only come in here for directions, while deciding whether or not to partake of the establishment’s ‘hospitality’.

I looked sideways at the solitary barstool-occupant. A man wearing glasses that must have made the interior even darker, by the look of them.

“Excuse me?”

“A pirate can also mean people who are not eligible for things but take them nevertheless.”

I felt affronted. Could he mean me? Perhaps this was a club for carefully chosen members and I had parked my car outside ‘illegally’?

I was immediately inclined to leave without further conversation. This was part of the country to which I was unaccustomed. Visiting someone from University days I hadn’t seen for years. We’d just got reacquainted by some internet finding-old-friends site. Maybe old friends were not meant to rediscover each other – as in the old days, with very little means to do so. Such precarious reunions could cause all manner of ‘not-meant-to-be’ situations – and the world sent off into directions equally ‘not-meant-to-be’. These were not original thoughts of mine that I was thinking as I waited to decide about my next move in the dark bar. I had had these thoughts for some time when deciding to pursue, via the internet, certain lost friendships in the first place. But there was something ringing at the back of my mind about my current predicament in the dark bar being a ‘not-meant-to-be’ of some significant risk to my health and safety. A pirate destiny, as it were.

If words could be caught like infections – there I had just thought about the word that seemed to be preoccupying the man in dark glasses who had just used it – twice. As if he was toying with it. Worrying it, teasing it, trying it out on his lips. Obsessed with it.

A member of the bar staff – and I was pleased to see it was a female of some age – now suddenly arrived in my vicinity to take my order.

“Is that your car outside?”

She pointed at a shape I could hardly discern through the window.

“I guess it is,” I said.

“Well, can you move it? It’s private.”

So, I hadn’t been far wrong with my earlier presumptions. But the place had a sign outside indicating it was a public bar serving drink and food.

“Private?” I responded in questioning echo.

“Yes, private.”

“Private,” more forcefully echoed the man in dark glasses.

“Is this private, too?” I asked with a nod towards the bar, trying to take some initiative without antagonising anyone with a forceful reference to the public sign outside.

Thoughts raced through my head. Time seemed to stand still. Many things put on the internet with the wrong assumption of it being private were often available for viewing by many millions. Just see the hit counter if there is one to see at all. Just because these potential millions don’t make their presence known to you does not mean they aren’t there, watching, reading, toying, teasing, worrying at your words ... obsessing ... storing up a whole host of ‘not-meant-to-be’ scenarios. How often have you conducted what you think is a private conversation on a blog or a supposedly ill-frequented forum – only to discover it was far from private. It’s easy to imagine seclusion even when millions are watching you.

Suddenly, the bar woman pointed at a word engraved on the mirror – the backs of the shorts and optics reflected dimly in it.

The word was, of course, “Private”. Except the letters seemed slightly mixed up and one letter had teasingly been rubbed off as if in a game. It was then I saw the woman was wearing a black patch over one eye, fixed in place by a single elastic band around her scarfed head. Stepping nearer, the man took off his dark glasses, then opened his chest...

“The address is dot dot dot,” said George.

“No, it isn't, it's dash dash dash.,” replied Albert.

The two old gents sat on the bench outside Blackwoods Supermarket, gazing across the fields at the spire of a distant church. They knew there was a town over there quite different and separate from the town in which they always sat whiling away the hot Summer’s day.

Passers-by somehow proved that town’s other existence. They were not consistently the same passers-by so they must live at least somewhere else. They’d always be the same passers-by if they lived in the same town as the two old gents.

The times were ones when people didn’t travel far from their own home town – either because of a lack of money or due to rudimentary transport systems that worked irregularly. Different towns then were different countries now.

The two old gents were speculating beyond the realms of their usual gossip. Gossip became a bit tedious after many years. So they used to make things up. About imaginary places. Imaginary towns. Imaginary people. Waking dreams tossed between them as the day shone on.

Sometimes the imaginary people took off like semi-real existences upon flights of fancy. Often they became so very real to the two old gents, the existences fleshed out and became the new passers-by miming the people just conjured up by the two old gents as passing by.

Then the two old gents returned to gossip of the trivial and mundane. Then they perked up again with fresh flights of fancy. Except their vocabulary was not a match for their fancies. They interspersed their talk with 'dot dot dot' and 'dash dash dash' as a sort of personal morse code to fill any gaps. But, meanwhile, they were able to visualise the things that underpinned the dots and dashes, but whether telepathy worked or whether they visualised quite differently not even their telepathy could tell them.

“The address is dot dot dot," said George, visualising the road before he visualised the house. The road was indeed “Dot Dash Dot Avenue” and the house-name “Dash Dot Dash Villa” – and out from it came a figure made completely of dots and dashes that needed joining up into shapes as in a children’s dot-to-dot puzzle. He gradually made out a woman’s bits and bobs from amid the emerging squiggles.

Suddenly, he visualised his own eyes welling with tears.

“You know, I love her,” he said.

“Why don’t you go there, then?” asked Albert.

“I’m not sure of the address.”

“Sad, that.”

“Yes, sad, that.”

“But do you know her name?”

“Dot. Her name is Dot.”

“Short for something?”

“Ah, yes.”

“Ah, I know her. You’re welcome to her. A flighty piece.”

Silence, punctuated by dry sobbing.


Written today and first published here

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is of ‘Different Skins’ by Gary McMahon (Screaming Dreams 2009). [My previous reviews are linked from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm ]

This review will be done slowly, savouringly, in real time, so please do not look back here more than once every few days for additions.
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EVEN THE DEAD DIE

Part One - My London Ghost
"There are hundreds of streets out there in the Shitty City..."
As stirred in me by an incident told here, I think Horror Fiction is looking through the fish-eye into the corridor outside your bedsit? Do you open the door when you have first glimpsed what you have glimpsed...? For one moment, I though it was a real fisheye and a real me looking through it.
The initial setting casts an under-grounded, inward-swarming, dead-leaning London as a receptacle for the Personal and the Recurrent. Our first-person singular protagonist addresses us direct and we cannot help but participate in our act of reading something that flows more like listening.
A shame the very first sentence contains, to my eyes, a blatant hilarious misprint. Or maybe it isn't a misprint. I may hit on its signficance later. Or it may just prove that the inadvertently ridiculous is subservient to the deliberately compulsive, especially when the protagonist's own dreaming of the unreal him forces you to dream of the real him. (4 Oct 09)

Part Two - Body Badges
"'The tattoo's forever...'"
The self-dramatised monologue continues, beautifully, darkly threaded with its soul-mate (dialogue) and its parameter (vision). London is not only an eschatological receptacle hinted by the previous part, but a vessel of paranoia, reconciliation-of-evil and irony. Not only eschatology but a faecal scatology. Amazing stuff.
"The choice is simple: we either reach out to connect or let the moment pass..."
The skin-tattoos are a particularly effective metaphor, i.e. of permanence, the ultimate non-nemonymous late-label, contrasting with the pale transients and the Traveller tattoo (upon our protagonist himself) as signs of impermanence that is strangely more permanent than permanence itself. And now not only the underground, but the under-underground of weirdly named stations. And a new form of sex and cross-addressing.
"'It is all diversion therapy, of course: a way of pussyfooting around what you already know...'" (5 Oct 09)

Part Three - The Big Black
This completes 'Even The Dead Die'. I have many thoughts going through my head, as stirred by this final part. Some I can't nail. It's as if the escapist Death Games of childhood are now provided by this book for us in adulthood. But none of those games took account of 'The Big Black' and Kerouac.
There are some rather disturbing images in this part (with the power of a McMahon in overdrive), images, that if you are not a seasoned Horror reader, will probably scar - or tattoo or 'God's signature' - you or your skin for life. Even if you are seasoned, I don't give a very comforting prognosis for your peace of mind...
At times, I was perturbed by the almost automatic, too easy unrolling of seemingly outlandish plot-data via dialogue in this final part. But if that was a fault, it is a minor one. The earlier irony now often touches on satire.
Strangely, one of the most frightening moments, for me, was the female protagonist ringing someone called Pin on her mobile.
And, if I may touch on a frivolous point, I fear for the long-term safety of Mr Tweety in view of what appeared in that first sentence of Part One!
I still reserve my judgement on the whole book's gestalt, as I prepare to enter its second half, as entitled 'In The Skin'. (6 Oct 09)
*
IN THE SKIN
One - All Alone Together
"...the love I have for my family causes me an exquisite agony."
McMahon, I feel, is the master of what I call 'the Horror Prose', both literary and slick, whereby all senses are subject to synaesthesia but personal aspirations fall short of those senses. A synaesthesia that artfully hints of Horror tropes within it ... plus a disconnection, a detachment that is paradoxically sensual. Here McMahon even excels himself, telling of a family man, his business trip to New York away from his family who have just moved into a new house, his temptations, inbuilt goodness, urges, self-deceptions, aching soul. This promises much...
An interested party publicly asked me yesterday about this review - "But do you like it?" Yes, I like this book, am enjoying it very much so far, but 'like' and 'enjoy' are difficult words in this context. As if they, too, are detached.
"...we reach out to each other but rarely ever touch, missing the connection by inches, miles, light years..." (7 Oct 09)

Two - We Are It
Upon returning to it, this story itself becomes its own changeling. Honestly wrenching stuff, and, for me, as a father long ago of small children, horrifically empathisable. The connection breach between him and his famly has widened so much it needs bridging with things that try to climb from the story to your very own personal story-within ... in parallel with that thing in the garden craning towards pawing the protagonist's own window. I shall not say more for fear of easing things too much for you by preparing you for coping with it. I don't think I'm being too melodramatic when I say I now need simply to prepare myself - with "the ghost of a smile to tickle my lips" - for proceeding onward to what must await. A changeling of a changeling, a notch or ratchet up? Or down? (7 Oct 09 - three hours later)

Another two hours later -- I shall deal with the final two parts together, as the reading-rush (much like the sugar rush in eating) has become all-consuming and the fourth part is relatively tiny:
Three - The Patter of Tiny Feet
Four - Thin as Skin
Firstly, may I get this particular exorcism off my chest: "...the twisted corpse of a house cat, a neighbour's pet. The skin has been peeled carefully from the cat's skull, and the strange marking I rubbed off the door frame is stencilled onto the sticky red bone..."
Strangely, however, having quoted it, that tangential moment seems to parallel the whole rite-of-passage in the final two parts. I will not describe further the outcome of the plot. There is no safe bridge between it and us. I think at least part of me - as a reading-soul - slipped between. "There is little distinction". No distinguishing the edges.
Indeed, I don't think I have experienced such a self-rending tour-de-force as a book's finale in empathy with any protagonist during my long history of reading fiction. You can only experience it for yourself.
Like it? Enjoy it? Forget it, big man!
-------------------------
I shall not read the author's story notes at the end of the book. I hate author story notes. The text is all. If the text needed more, then the text would have been given more. Indeed, I did glimpse that McMahon himself has headed these notes: "Oh, no, it's the Story Notes!"
I will return to the beginning of the book, however, and soon read Tim Lebbon's Introduction, to see what further food for thought this luminary may give.
The whole book as a gestalt? There is one. John Donne's HOLY SONNET TEN and John Donne himself. (7 Oct 09 - another two hours later)
==================

Once I grew used to the idea, it would still be hard for me to get to know the two old gents who replaced the two who had gone. There always had been two old gents populating the bench outside Blackwoods Supermarket – near the Town hall car park – opposite the Bookworm bookshop – all in a town that tried to be a village.

The previous two old gents had occupied that bench for it seemed forever – at least two decades just by my reckoning alone. Most of the time, they hardly grew older than they originally were.

The town went on day by day, with little change. Mrs Clark of the local Blackwood family, with the ear of each recurring holder of Mayoral office, was a stickler for keeping all change at bay. And shop signs were kept in position even when the shops using them had changed completely. Some called it laziness, others the credit crunch – but any change seemed to be a badness in itself whatever the bigger badness that the change may have changed into a goodness.

So when – overnight, as it were – the two old gents that had long held fort outside the supermarket in sedentary male gossip changed into two completely different old gents, I was perhaps the first to notice. My philosophy of life involved things staying the same by only changing gradually....so gradual, in fact, the changing was barely perceptible. So, here my sense of accustomed reality was challenged.

As witness, I was not alone for long. The Bookworm proprietor came out with the usual array of cheapies to stack outside in all weathers. He double-took the bench opposite with the two new old gents sitting on it. He then looked at me – triangulated, as I was, beside the car park entrance in relation to him and the two gents together as one.

But not an unchanged tableau for long. Mrs Clark, now squaring the set piece, was soon spotted scowling beside her Austin Mini.....all of us as if in an ancient sepia photograph being taken by an unseen onlooker who is new to the town.

From Blackwoods Supermarket comes the Undertaker in front of the first of two cheap coffins upon the shoulders of faceless procession.

Written today and first published here

SUMMARY OF DFL READINGS:
CARETAKER: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=57&page=1
MY GIDDY AUNT: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=37&page=1 - Published in Year's Best Horror Stories 1992
SNAIL TRAIL: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=23&page=1 - Abridged by Amy Ewbank
THE HOUND by HP Lovecraft: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=22&page=1
THE TELL-TALE HEART by Edgar Allan Poe: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=25&page=1
DOWN TO THE BOOTS: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=24&page=1 - Published 'Dagon' 1989 and 'Shadows Over Innsmouth' 1994
MELTDOWN: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=27&page=1 - First published in 'The Starry Wisdom' book (1994)... foreshadowing the 2009 global meltdown?
WATCH THE WHISKERS SPROUT: First published: 'Cthulhu's Heirs' (Chaosium Press 1994) Republished: 'Weirdmonger' (Prime Books 2003) http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=33&page=1
UNCLE ABSOLUTELY: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=34&page=2
CELLIANO: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?action=play&catid=2&linkid=44&page=1
ECLAIRCISSEMENT (poem): http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?linkid=46&catid=2
CANDLE DREAMING: http://www.ligotti.net/local_links.php?catid=1&linkid=56
----------------
PUBLIC READINGS:
THE GRINAGOG: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1585
THE PROVENANCE OF SOULS: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2778
GRASS: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=677
TUGGING THE HEARTSTRINGS: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1794
WORK NOT STRICTLY DONE, BUT NO FURTHER ATTEMPTS WILL BE MADE: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=1208
THE MISSING ARROW: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=811
GRASS (2) or THE MISSING ARROW (2): http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=814
BUILD A CHARACTER: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=2615

Regarding the links below, please download from yellow bar at the foot of the page as shown. Please let me know if this presents a problem.
The Brainwright (1990): http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah81a60/n/VN650137_WMA
Snail Trail: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80985/n/VN650019_WMA
Bloodbone: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah805g3/n/VN650031_WMA .
The Piano: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80501/n/VN650032_WMA.
Small Fry: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah8052c/n/VN650036_WMA.
Egnis: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah8054f/n/VN650041_WMA .
Padgett Weggs: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah8055a/n/VN650085_WMA.
When I was An Old Man: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80559/n/VN650086_WMA
The Tallest King: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80567/n/VN650108_WMA
In Unison: http://www.filefactory.com/file/ah80572/n/VN650139_WMA

NOTE: Reading aloud of my novel THE HAWLER: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_hawler_read_aloud.htm

written today and first published here

I always had the same dream during that period of two weeks when staying with Sarah. It is a long story to tell you about Sarah and how I came into her life. Suffice to say, that I did not befriend Sarah for her large country house; I did not befriend Sarah for the regular sex that later ensued; I did not befriend Sarah for the comfort and confidence-building she provided as we talked into the late afternoons around a moment-in-time, an occasion that we happened simply to call ‘tea and biscuits’.

We often met in the wet streets of Colchester, visiting the cinema for unwanted, unwatched film matinees - flickering screens that seemed to wash over us - then eventually migrating to a cafe that kept open later than the others for our sessions of ‘tea and biscuits’. Neither of us crossed the line. We simply met, then unmet ... until we met again. A routine that was not recognised as a routine. A routine with no obvious end ... until, that is, out of the blue, Sarah invited me for a two week stay in her country house.

I record here – in the hope you may consider this tantamount to a legal document – that I did not spend those wet afternoons in Colchester meeting Sarah in our late middle-age for any other reason than that we had met at a book club and simply met again outside of the book club with no ulterior motive within each of us or no ulterior motive between us together. There was not even the motive of neutralising loneliness. In fact, Sarah never gave me the impression she was lonely at all. And she, I am confident, never received the impression from me that I was lonely. So it was not for that reason. Our meetings just were. The fact we called the core of each meeting ‘tea and biscuits’ seemed to relieve us of the necessity or duty of rationalising our relationship any further.

Our relationship changed, of course, following Sarah’s sudden invitation to me to visit her country house for a two week stay. In hindsight, that was not only the seed of the relationship’s growth but also the seed of its destruction. We should probably have left it at ‘tea and biscuits’.

It is a long story, too, about the circumstances of the recurring dream. It only started coming when first sleeping in the guest room at Sarah’s country house, a place I often visited just for various weekends after the initial much longer toe-in-the-water fortnight.

Suffice to say that most normal dreams – or normal dreams to which I at least am accustomed – feature flowing events, whether linear or non-linear, but certainly events, moving images, echoes of real life in recognisable if possibly mutated interaction, some echoes forgotten, others not. But, no, the dream in question was what I called a ‘candle dream’. Since then, I have heard of many people having candle dreams, once I admitted to those people about having candle dreams, i.e. once having had them during stays with Sarah, with whom, let it be said, I have since lost contact.

How many of you have had candle dreams?

You need to know what a candle dream is before being able to answer my question, I’m sure. Others may know candle dreams with different names. Let me tell you that a candle dream, in my understanding, can be also called a fixed-camera dream, a frozen dream (or, at least, near-frozen), an unwavering dream (even if the candleflame itself wavers), a static dream (even if it flickers slightly), a single-frame dream (even if the image imperceptibly strobes or, as they say in the trade, cart-wheels), a single-flame dream (even if there is an after-image of a flame burnt on the retina by the original flame).

Simply put, a candle dream is of a single candle with a slightly flickering flame (with or without a candlestick, but usually with an ornate candlestick), and your minimalist view of it is as a slightly unwavering, non-shortening candle-wax and, from within the dream, perceived to be alight for eternity. A fear of eternity within a dream, let me tell those of you who are unaware of this fact, is the greatest fear of all. In other words, a candle dream is not a nice dream to dream. It cannot really be called a nightmare, I suppose, because nightmares are traditionally never static, never single-frame, indeed never single-flame. Nightmares have monsters and obvious fears and mutant echoes of life. Many who dream candle dreams rarely have contact with lit candles in real life. Many who dream candle dreams never complain of having nightmares.

One never knows whether any particular candle dream is the last candle dream you will ever dream ... whether, indeed, the eternity you sense from within the dream is a real eternity or not.

Sarah once told me during our tea and biscuits in her drawing-room at the country house that if I could tell someone, like herself, about the dream, as I was then doing as part of our usual small talk, then that fact was proof positive I had escaped the eternity of the candle dream.

I suppose I should have insisted that we abandon the sex and return to just meeting in the wet streets of Colchester, visiting the cinema matinees and late-opening cafe as part of a routine that may, in hindsight, have lasted us for a good while, even until we both no longer needed or even wanted company. It is now strange, looking back on it all, how I never questioned, during our small talk, how our afternoons together were always so wet, with Colchester being in the driest part of the country.

A story by Simon Strantzas

My review of it:

"I don't need to know any more sick people. I know me..."

I found this story quite unbearable, in a deeply poignant way. It should be read by everyone who is terminally ill. And we all are. I made the 'mistake' of reading it while listening to Mahler's Adagio from his 5th symphony. I shall never be the same...genuinely. The story is like a symphony in itself, alternating between the sick person's diary and a straightforward narration. That we are all part of each other - part of our history and future as self and unself. Even when those we loved we may not have loved enough because of inbuilt negative as well as positive symbiosis.

To think the ghost child within me may live on gives some sort of comfort. As does the story's ending. But deep down, we know that ghost is a snowdust bunny.

Literature like this can give you inspirational remissions along the way, but it is never forever. Old is only one letter short of cold. Esche one letter short of Escher.

"She coughed in a fit [...] until her eyes were full of stars."

My review of the whole book HERE

Melissa and the Singer (by Terry Grimwood)

My review of this story:

This is a brilliant story. Simple, staccato language suits Grimwood. Actually, with 'Melissa and the Singer', I was compelled to read to the end voraciously, quite agog. Both cringing and uplifting. I really felt Melissa's emotions. The stress of an office party in all ts nightmarishness. It is an effective story of a gauche, overweight girl in a highly believably-evoked office scenario of professional and personal politics. Presumably, this story was written before the Susan Boyle 'Britain's Got Talent' phenomenon? (The story is in a book that was first published in 2008). Whatever the case, it either prefigures (or echoes) that phenomenon with panache and memorability. I won't forget this story for a long time. I will continue fathoming how Melissa progresses beyond the story's end, Susan Boyle or not.

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is of 'The Nightfarers' a collection of short fiction by Mark Valentine (Ex Occidente Press 2009). I shall attempt to draw out the book's leitmotifs and mould them into its gestalt.
This review will be done slowly, savouringly, in real time, so please do not look back here more than once every few days for additions.
All my real-time reviews are linked from HERE.

Upon the cover is writ large:
"WHO IN THIS MORTAL LIFE WOULD SEE
THE LIGHT THAT IS BEYOND ALL LIGHT,
BEHOLDS IT BEST BY FARING FORTH
INTO THE DARKNESS OF THE NIGHT."
Caveat to my review: This book contains a story entitled 'Undergrowth' that was first published in NEMONYMOUS in 2007.
.
The 1909 Proserpine Prize
This is a delightful tale of a literary pize that should itself win a literary prize for invention an imagination. But no, it is not imagination. It is a truthifiction upon the cross of fantastical literature, in a gloriously textured prose and atmosphere: an admixture of the two Jameses, M.R. and Henry, sown with many of the weird fiction giants, some of whom are mentioned in this very story.
It tells of the judging of a literary prize that is awarded for works in the tradition of Lord Lytton. in the year in question, Hodgson, Stoker, Bowen (Marjorie not Elizabeth), Shiel, Upward, Blackwood and a near nemonymous work which causes the judges much coincidence-angst and trial author late-labelling. Both hilarious and dark. A true treasure of conceits. The best conceit is left to the end.
I was delighted that the Blackwood came close. This was because the work in question, his novel JIMBO, has long been a favourite of mine. To prove it: HERE is me including it in my top ten novels in 2000.
I won't give away what book won and the circumstances of its winning. A story that simply has to be read. (2 August 09)


Carden in Capaea
A philosophy of the ineffable here cast as a highly-honed ‘poetic / scientific’ explication to a within-text audience. On the face of it a fantasy of a fantasy, making a special form of palimpsest. An alchemy of colours, an ethos of dust and nemonymity. The intrinsic power of more words for things than sense. This story is made up of words. There is also a clue in Marsh Fever, and therefore in Swine Flu (?), to unlock further linguistic delight from this text. Yet its sense-flow of words is more limpid than these words of mine portend. We’re all in its audience. Not outside looking in, but inside looking out. And, thus, we reach some form of literary grace. (3 August 09)


White Pages
Oh, Crikey, for me, this is tops. For a start, I love seeking out obscure books in secondhand bookshops simply for the quest itself. But, here, we have the quest for varieties of blank books! Heaven!
I've already formulated a picture of THE NIGHT-FARERS' gestalt: the drogulus. And I already truly think that it is THIS book that is the book I've been seeking all my life.
'White Pages' is beautifully worded and imaginatively illuminated - and prefigures 'Undergrowth, or vice versa. But I'm jumping ahead of myself ... literally.
[A personal note: Nemonymous Six doesn't actually exist, and it probably never will. "The Non-Existent Edition," as it's dubbed by the editor, was announced in May 2006 as existing in the tradition of stories such as 'The Vanishing Life and Films Of Emmanuel Escobada', 'Four minutes thirty-three seconds' (the world's first blank story published in print, i.e. in Nemonymous 2) and 'Mighty Fine Days' (in Nemonymous 2) and 'The Painter' (in Nemonymous 4), plus the blank cover of Nemonymous 4 ... and other features of previous editions. Nemonymous Six is a drogulus... [from 'Wikipedia' that possibly will be blank, too, one day, when the Internet as a whole vanishes up my fundament.]] (3 August 09 - 3 hours later)


The Inner Sentinel
The prose is golden. It is a sheer delight, both textured and simple at once. This is surely a classic weird tale of the first water. Why have I not read it before? It shimmers with dream and MR Jamesian scholarship, but eventually effulgent with Hodgson, Lovecraft, Blackwood, Wagner, Tolkien, Sir Granville Bantock, John Cowper Powys (and more) in varying degrees of word-anvil beating. Here we see the making of the drogulus into a form of waking dream where it seems to begin to exist as a double negative. The word 'Redoubt' takes on a double meaning, in this very sense of 'magic fiction' as opposed to 'magic realism'. I cannot recommend this tale enough to the Weird tale specialist and layman alike. But how do we know we can trust the story's Narrator - or, even, the story's head-lease author? Into the Vale of the Valentine.
On a lighter note (and I do not lightly use that terminology), I was glad to see an Oast-House (that Kentish birther of beer) likened to a 'great cone turned slightly awry, twisted out of true'... LAWKS! I've just quoted part of the text. (4 August 09)


The Dawn at Tzern
I will not repeat mention of the prose in this book. Please take it as read.
This story is a charming tale of an enclave called Tzern, the death of an Emperor, a postman's loyalty to the deceased's immanent spirit by retaining in defiance the old stamps with the Emperor's head, a priest who likes his tobacco and reads things, not into its leaves, but into the wrapping in which it is delivered, who also reads a breviary or what one assumes to be a breviary. A retreating army, one of whom is a young man who thinks himself invulnerable. And that's only scratching the story's surface. It's gorgeous. Thought-provoking. And resplendent with the resurrectional power of a story's soul.
The story's ending, that I will not give away other than to call it a 'dawn', gives justification to my form of real-time reviewing of books. You see what you see. And I see Tzern as in Cern Zoo. And that gives me all manner of readings from and into the story's innermost being and outermost wrapping, readings with which I will not bother you. But they are there. (4 August 09 - 5 hours later)


The White Sea Company
As a long-time visitor to Dunwich, Suffolk and a seeker of the engulfed cathedral, I love this Debussyan, Dunsanyan well-characterised take on the the voyages of historic exploration made meticulously ledger-within-ledger of open-ended terrestrial treasures of discovery emerging either because simply you have not found them before (like Darkest Africa) or because they actually emerge from the fantasy itself as fully-formed land masses. A delightful tale told with conscientious precision as well as with a wide magnanimity of the careless soul. The paper on which words float itself is a White Sea, methinks. (6 August 09)


Undergrowth
There is no avoiding it. I have for well over two years thought this story to be a genuine well-seasoned literary gem that shall be an anthologised evergreen. And it is, even more so when seen in the context of this beautiful artefact: 'The Nightfarers'. If you are browsing this book in a bookshop this is the one to read for free as you stand there. Short enough and inspiring enough to set you on your way and loosen your purse - because you're then certain to buy the book itself. A deadly curse, however, if you pilfer it. Anything I say about its plot and sensibility and references will spoil it, I feel, which is rather a cop out thing for a reviewer to say. One person's undergrowth is another's overgrowth. This, though, for me, sprouts between them both: a benignancy bang right in the middle of my soul. (7 August 09)


The Seer of Trieste
Literary constructions built upon a 'genius loci', richly evoked by words and the spirits of words, trawling not only myths of authorial intention but also masked balls, alter-boys, an octopus and more entwined. I sense I need to read this tale at least twice more before I write anything about it. But I fear that the second time I'd be engulfed by a sort of 'Finnegans Wake' monster that was only stirring slightly during the first reading.
I am utterly dumbfounded by this book, I have to say. I have known of MV for many years and in fact a friend of mine used to correspond with him in the late eighties. I may even have done so. But I can no longer be sure. Icons seem to have no past. And, as a result of this book, MV is a new authorial icon for me. (7 August 09 - 4 hours later)


Their Dark and Starry Mirrors
Echoing from the quoted verse on the book's front cover shown above and following the previous story, this is of semi-disgraced seer (or, in this case, eventual non-seer), exiled to scry, for the Caliph, scintilla of distant messages by light and mirror. He is still well-regarded by the court astrologer and, indeed, the harmonics of astrology I myself have studied to the point of scrying the darknesses (droguli) between the stars and the planets as more efficacious than scrying the stars and planets themselves....
This is a beautifully told story of ephemeris and banner. I took it personally. I, too, ill-jested and crossed swords with tradition ... and was exiled to sea-lit Clacton to fiddle with anonymous texts.... (8 August 09)


The Bookshop in Nový Svet
I'll say straight off: I can't do justice to this story. I'd only rewrite the whole story, if I started analysing its connections and charms, its synchronised shards of random truth and fiction, its highly-honed magic of conceit and prosody. Merely, let me say that over many years (during my career as Principal Pension Trust Secretary) I mixed socially and professionally with highly-placed Actuaries but, truth to say, I never imagined them extrapolating their highly-wrought and empirically tested Mortality (Death) and Morbidity (Illness) Tables towards the statistics and mathematically-matched considerations of poetry, art, imagination, 'me-ness' and professional mourning...all for financial gain! There is a poet in this story, too, who is known under the nemonym of Z. I merely add that because of my own mischievous sip at the black spirit. Rest assured, meanwhile, I shall not relinquish my struggle with this book's gestalt as a drogulus-in-disguise. (8 August 09 - 3 hours later)


The English Leopard: An Heraldic Dialogue
A non-linear academic overture to its own inbuilt Notes (Notes with Numbers but no correlative Numbers adjacent to the correct references in the Dialogue's text and, in fact, the last Note has no reference at all to de-Note let alone an adjacent Note number in the text)...followed by a double-barrelled Appendix. The Adjacency and non-Adjacency and Double-Barreledness are tantaleon to a form of Alternate Heraldry in my mind. The core of this Chamber exercise in ill-notated Early Music is the devices of Lion and Leopard and how each or both relate to the de-Noting heraldrically and occultishly of our heritage through the onward thrust of Social, Monarchical / Maniacal, Religious History in England-France and elsewhere. Knowledge of History in general is recommended when construing this admittedly well-limbed exercise. My knowledge of History is cloudy, so I shall move on and seek my drogulus rampant elsewhere. (9 August 09)


The Box of Idols
Again I am astonished at this book's substance of language. 'The Box of Idols' tells of a bibliophile who tries to solve the mystery of his friend's idols (or household gods) fidgeting once they were housed in a compartmented box found by chance.
The story's own precision is no match for its own conceits. A story that out-stories itself. An imputed Sherlock Holmes descrying connections, connections that lead to concerns outweighing the weightiest imaginings.
I once owned a toy printing-set when a child, whereby, with tweezers, I meticulosuly transposed the tiny letters from their bank to a their new home of language, then ready to be stamped on an ink-pad of black spirit and later dye-cast upon the white sea of paper. Little did I know what revelations would be unlocked by my future reading of those very same letters - if in different positions - compiling this excellent story today.
The characters are well drawn. The rationale pitch perfect. And the letters thankfully no longer lonely. (9 August 09 - 7 hours later)

The Axholme Toll
This story has the strongest 'genius loci' I think I have encountered in all literature. Seriously. Even more so than this book's own Vale of Valentine I earlier sensed, if not read about: a place where, as towards this story's end, there is an 'amiable and pottering sort of man' assisting you to explore ... a tutelary spirit who may or may not be the head-lease author himself.
I will let the reader explore this story's 'genius loci' for him- or herself, without describing it at second-hand. I have not checked all its facts in obvious places of reference, but the place rings true, in more ways than one of its title. It is a delightful MR-Jamesian journey of a solitude-loving man who meets lore and legends, not head on, but head within. Four ghosts, or what I took to be ghosts, that will haunt me forever. And, serendipitously for me, there is an unresolved famous nemonymous book that acts as backdrop to the 'genius loci'.
This story is this book's island where the only toll needed is the price of this book. It is essential to remain blinkered to the other more modern things that have been built on this 'island'. This story's amiability of narration does just that for you, but, miraculously, not without describing those modern things for the sake of your complete 'reality' as visitor. (10 August 09)

The Seven Treasures of Bucharest
(a collaboration with Geticus Polus)
In the Nineteen Sixties, it is on record that I formed the Zeroist Group, loosely tied with the Dada movement, or an attempt even to reach some Sub-Dada realm. I also collected my then near-juvenile poems under the overall title of 'Dark Lights'... perhaps all that culminated today with Cone Zero ... and this makes me think that the gestalt of this whole book is not one single gestalt but each and every reader's past, each and every reader's own set of personal connections with it, connections and leitmotifs that the book actually entices into existence in different forms according to which reader is reading it at the time.
Looking back at what I have written in the whole review above, this theory of bespoke gestalt very much seems to be the case, and its final realisation or crystallisation was at this very moment ignited by my reading 'The Seven Treasures of Bucharest' (a story in seven parts and of near novella length). However, that is not to say that each reader's individual 'crystallisation' is not a drogulus in itself. Each a drogulus with different characteristics.
'The Seven Treasures of Bucharest' itself tells of arcane matters, but essentially of quests and quests within quests, the garnering of relics or 'ready-mades'. I could delve into each and every 'ready-made', each and every quest endlessly. It is a significant event in my literary life and perhaps I should devote much space here to explaining why. But, no, let it suffice to say that the main quest is for the ultimate throw, the ultimate chance, i.e. the optimum Synchronised Shard of Random Truth and Fiction ... mixed with religious and semi-religious affairs, politics and gameplaying, loyalty to self even if the self's constituent selves are slippery, art and preservation of one's environment in traditional ways, diplomacy, imprisonment, luck, statistics, language, serendipity, the 'Circle of Contemplative Thought'...
"The letters gleamed as if their darkness was coated with a curious light." LAWKS! I've quoted from the text again! I thought that there's no teaching an old dog new tricks. But this book has proved me wrong. I highly recommend the whole book for its separate 'ready-mades' (first the letters and then the words), for its quests within quests (the stories that can either be enjoyed like 'islands' or as a 'white sea company') and, finally, for its gestalt within the larger gestalt that is you.
END

I hear it rumoured that this is to be a twelve novel series, making one gigantic novel. I believe it to be a highly significant work, judging by what I know of it already.

I have already commented on an earlier form of a different novel by this author HERE that as 'Odalisque' is being revised, I understand, and will form one of these twelve novels.

The first novel, recently completed, is: JANE

I intend to comment - in a modestly timely savouring - upon each chapter, as provided to me by the author. You can ask me a for a word document of each chapter at dflewis48@hotmail.com

The links to my comments will gradually appear below.

I shall be trying to prevent my previous knowledge of this work from affecting my approach to 'Jane'.

JANE - the first in the 'Warriors of Love' novels by PF Jeffery

BOOK ONE:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six

First Entr'acte

BOOK TWO:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six

Second Entr'acte

BOOK THREE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six

Until further notice, if you specifically request it, every order for Nemonymous will be accompanied by a lovely copy of ANONthology (Harper Collins). Thanks to them for supplying these for this purpose.
My review of ANONthology here.

Following my real-time review of 'ANONthology' HERE, I show below my guesses of authorship. I have no reason to believe I should be good at this task!













DO - Christopher Nicholson
PAVILION - Yiyun Li
THE HYPNOTIST'S WIFE - Joyce Carol Oates
THE POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS OF THE LOVER - Patrick Gale
THE APPROACH - Laura Spinney
PURPLE INK - Rebecca Connell
LETTER FROM PARIS - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
IN THE CAMP - Philip Hensher
THE BEARS - Rudolph Delson

This is a sequel to Billy Belly.



Ertz was one bogie short of a nose. Deirdre knew Ertz at an impressionable age: two young fools: I should know, since, though older, I was one, too. Looking back on the whole thing, we three were inseparable at school. Whilst now, I don't know where they've gone. They may as well never have been. No forwarding points, no keepsakes, in fact increasingly next to no remembrances at all.

Still, in life, there are many ways to skin a story, many means to make a memory. I should fill in a few dos and don'ts of something done during our life together back in the old days, when days were old with natural vintage and not new and tawdry as days tend to be these days. I then may be able to string up a tale to hang Ertz and Deirde from. Bring them back as souls, if not bodies. Jug them a juice to by-pass death with. An existence far more tangible than anything real life ever gave them.

So, where shall I start? Too early and they'd still be silent cry-babies with only mothers to give them a bellyful. I was lot older, or slightly older since a difference of four years is as nothing now. Perhaps that was why I was less impressionable. Less of a fool, if still a fool. No, where the beginning lies is somewhere in the middle - them ten years old and me fourteen, ten years ago.

Much must be taken for granted, including the past that came before the past at which I start reconstituting the truth behind the memories and the past which is still the past by being before the perspective of the present. With that said, if clumsily, let me begin in my own way with Ertz - which, if beginnings are anything to go by, is the second beginning I've tried to make. And let me be more economical with my flair. Less slick with my sack of sayings. Ertz was simply an untamed kid at ten years old. One brain short of a mind. One loose nose short of a head. Known only by his second name, because nobody knew his first one, except perhaps his mother and she wasn't letting on. I expect she had second thoughts about the one she'd christened him with. Ertz was Ertz: the best description I can muster, until the shapeless slabs are slotted back together again to form childhood's crazy-paving. Which brings me to Deirdre - a girl with pig-tails and a tongue that ran away with itself. Her frocks were skimpy, knees knobbly and a heart bigger than her whole body put together again. The way I now describe her makes me think I was in love with her: the first passage-point of self-discovery, a stepping-stone in this my rite of the past. But to treat of my own character would be dangerous. The hardest feat of imagination is that of imagining the imaginer. Suffice to say that I was the ring-leader. The kind who invented games. Made up monsters for delicious delights of fright.

Hide-and-seek was our forte. How better to encapsulate a day in the life than to seek out such hidden moments? It was a hot day. I guess I must remember it well to have chosen this day. Ertz was late. The heat was shining less off the sky than the grass, with the first hints of dusk blurring the sunlit hills and rolling swards. And, indeed, I remember it better than well. I'm there now. Deirdre and I were practising hide-and-seek, while we awaited Ertz's arrival. The fact that we both crouched behind some trees did not seem to make mock of our rehearsal, lacking a seeker as we did. Nor did us hiding together seem as daft as it does now. Perhaps we had an ulterior motive. Or perhaps at least I did.

"Ertz is late," I said. See how well I remember it?

"Yes, so's Billy Belly late," she replied, lightly mentioning one of my invented monsters. Whether he was a vampire or a werewolf didn't seem to matter. He was probably neither. Or a mummy or ghoul. Or perhaps he was all these things. Whatever the case, Billy Belly waddled with a paunch that weighed more than the rest of his body, making his sackcloth flesh to crumple around his feet.

"Billy Belly is never late. He'll be early. It's just not his time to come. It's never his time to come. That's why he's always early."

I haughtily shrugged my shoulders as if I'd told a joke in the guise of a sacred truth. Or vice versa. Who knows? Who cares? I looked around at the disused golf course which served as this flashpoint for our childhood destinies. Mostly overgrown, where the semi-rough had become full-fledged - with a solitary ragged flag on its pole cocktailing a slimeful hole. The bunkers were still evident because their curved scars of sand failed to grow anything; they did not even cover themselves with dream's tidal seasons of soundless sea. Indeed, divots and dunes of landscape undulated towards the leaning grandstand of corroded girders that had been (to my mind) the ancient tessellated launch-ramps for space-rockets, but were really the cantilevered structures that had been erected for an international Open Golf Contest, one which I knew had never taken place because of the Great Recession. Peppering this our runnelled territory were the tiny dimpled white eggpods that aliens had laid in order to hatch out of them. An adventure playground, one with more misadventure to its credit than otherwise. It was our Heaven - and our Hell.

Ertz had still not arrived when the sun cast the grandstand in greater sloping lengths across the thighhigh greens, like black cancers (if my rather childish simile will here suffice).

"There are things that live in the old golf-holes," I said to Deirdre, continuing an earlier theme of mine.

"What things?" asked Deirdre mock-innocently, already knowing my usual answer. But the day wasn't a usual day, because, however usual it may have been, it became unusual by being the day I was to choose to remember - today.

"Men's thingies," I answered, "that have escaped their bodies. They're their wormholes."

Her face was a picture of picturing. I laughed at the strange thoughts I had released from their traps, like a pack of hounds running a fox to its earth. There was silence as we heard the footsteps of Ertz. Or footsteps belonging to whom we thought was Ertz. But the paces were heavier, shamblier, paddier, sluggier...

"Billy Belly?" whispered Deirdre in mock horror.

I shook my head knowing that Billy Belly was purely an invention, just like the vampires, werewolves and zombies with which I peopled other people. If "peopled" was the right word. But, really, I shook my head for my own benefit, not wishing to prolong the fantasy which, for one single moment, I believed had come back to haunt me with more than just a ghost of itself. So it was an unusual day all the time, despite today trying to describe a typical day of our childhood, when the fears didn't get out of hand. So why choose a day when they did get out of hand? Not the best way to construct the past, a slippery, darting-off, fork-tongued sort of past.

The sweet run of the fairways, the confident surrendering of the ball to the wind and to the whining weaves of weather, the awkward straggly fringes of grass where golfballs liked to hide, the choice of club, the caddie's unswervable servitude, the steep deep bunkers, the heady feel of the green up the putter's stem, the ball's tantalising swirl around the lip of the cup and its satisfying plop to the pit of the sunken drain. I could sense, if not scent, the rich tapestry of life left in the air around us, as I peered from our hiding-place to discover Ertz's whereabouts and, hopefully, Billy Belly's nowhere - only to see a plus-foured gent tugging dead birdies, if not eagles, from the tufts and tussocks with a long iron.

"Who is it?" asked Deirdre who dared not follow my gaze with hers.

"I don't know. It must be Ertz."

Surely it was Ertz or as near to being Ertz as it didn't matter. After all, I would have chosen a day to describe with Ertz in it, wouldn't I, if I wanted Ertz in it. He was an essential part of the threesome since, without him, we'd be only me and one other - and we'd only have each of us to bear witness. Her word against mine. My word against hers. We needed a third party to form the angles of perspective - like past, present and future. Why choose that day if Ertz wasn't to be there?

"Is it Billy Belly?"

"Don't be silly, Deirdre. Didn't I say? Billy Belly never comes."

"Unless he's early, you said."

I stared at my watch, as if that was the answer I could give ... until my head came up at the sound of something small but heavy swishing through the overgrowth, falling at my feet.

"It's his ball," said Deirdre, with surprising nonchalance.

"But no-one's played golf here for years and years," I replied, matching her nonchalance with words I remember rehearsing more years in the future than those I then consigned to the past.

By now the darkness had only reflected daylight between it and complete impenetrability. The figure, as it approached our hiding-place was not plus-foured after all - his calves looked tightly bandaged with somebody's creamy pink skin whilst the rest of him was swaddled baggily in somebody else's black skin. He wielded a driver that had a scooping blade which he employed to trawl the whiplash weeds in search of his loose white cannon. Hindsight fills in the details - only his face escaping terror's regeneration, except for the fact he had no profile worthy of a nose, a mouth fenced off with wood-veined teeth that waggled in complete vertical revolutions (rather like the door to our childhood den in the forest) and eyes that burned with the emptiness of Hell's twin pits (one of which some call Heaven). If he had a belly to speak of, then best not spoken of.

Deirdre screeched, providing doubt with certainty. He whoever-it-was flailed aside the dangling feelers of of our leafy hangar - and plucked us both by the neck's scruff from our ill-powered auras of invisibility.

"What have we here then?" His voice was gruffness laced with syrup. Recession incarnate.

"Only us," I said, meaning it.

Deirdre was silent, sounds having fled though the ears rather than risk the mouth. His eyes were suddenly for her only. I was a mere bit part. She the star in the black backdrop of his eyes. His middle belatedly bellied out like the phantom beginnings of child-bearing as he pawed at Deirde's clothes ready to suck her juices from wherever they happened to flow most easily.



Ertz would tell this story better than me. That's because he wasn't there; because the truth was stranger than any story even Ertz could concoct, and far less believable; because, as the truth unfolds, I begin to believe it less myself.

In the end, I've done little to retrace our paths through that crazy-golf called childhood - whilst inadvertently giving credence, and perhaps substance, to something worse than the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. Deirdre and Ertz eventually went somewhere else, I guess, making our land, perhaps paradoxically, smaller by the art of absence. Only the adventure playground of mismemory is left me. And I simply surrender words to the winds of time - each shot further from the hole: a long nose short of a double-bogie, given the sense of it. Or a belly full of stale drink and only frayed ancient eye-sockets to see with.


(published ‘Violent Spectres’ 1995)

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is of ‘The Terrible Changes’ a collection of short fiction by Joel Lane (Ex Occidente Press 2009). I shall attempt to draw out the book's leitmotifs and mould them into its gestalt. [My previous reviews are linked from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm ]


After The Flood
The main student protagonist lives in a bedsit in Leamington Spa where, during his weekend break away in Cardiff, there was torrential rain and a flood. When he returns his girl friend is missing. He then finds a replacement in a scenario of casual sex and performance music I do not understand. The flood is perhaps a metaphor for the internet. By not understanding, I find myself more easily believing the protagonist’s re-absorption into replications that become a swampy web of self and selves, sired by Occam’s Razor out of Blade Runner. Thankfully, spoilers feed off understanding first and foremost. Nothing but paper-cuts. (6 July 09)
.
Power Cut
From paper cuts to paper cuttings, pinned scraps of newsprint around the seedy backroom where the rent-boy had brought his customer, i.e. the story’s protagonist (Lake by name, appropriate after the first story’s flood (?) and uglier sounding than ‘Lane’ because of the ‘k’ sound if not the smoother meaning of a scenic ‘lake’ as opposed to the dark ‘lanes’ in a Midland city). This protagonist seems to be an uncaring prominent man but nevertheless a man needing the comfort as well as danger of such human contact amid the world’s mass communications that isolate rather than bring together ... tempted in this direction by the story’s topping and tailing of his lonely desperation by the candles of an old-fashioned Aids march through the city that finally threatens to subsume him as if he were (for me) some sort of wicker man. Those newspaper cuttings already on the rent-boy’s walls turn out, of course, to be significant. I hope that’s not a spoiler. The ‘enjoyment’ and meaning of Lane stories, I maintain, do not lie merely in what happens but in the way each individual reader reacts metaphorically and/or literally to it and in how it is described by the texture of language. You need to read the stories themselves for all that! Each reader's reactions are thus liable to produce a different book. This timeless story will haunt you because you begin to realise that changes are terrible when changes never manage to happen. Or terrible because they do happen. You can't win. (6 July 09 - 3 hours later)

Empty Mouths
I’m left open-mouthed with the seedy ambiance of bedsits, small factories, physical ghosts that are emblematic of cruelty or despairing love or mutation from mirrors or faltering identity, above all, the safety-net of shuttling relationships that has too many holes in it, an ambiance so cold the denizens actually dream of central heating, a horror video of cannibalism, a bone jigsaw, and I forgot the shapes of wicker-light in the previous story leading to “traces of candlewax gleamed on the mantelpiece” in this, and, here, the protagonist’s need to repeat her name time and time again. Every story needs a name, too – as well as its protagonist. This story cries its name time and time again. Then when that doesn’t work, it cries out its own author’s name. But nothing can come out of an empty mouth. A story that knows no bounds to its imputed despair. It cries my name. But I’m many miles away in a different ambiance altogether. It doesn’t even know I’m reading it, let alone writing about it.
Bars in the top windows of houses are either to imprison or to protect from things getting in... and silence is to protect mouths from getting frogs in the throat. (6 July 09 - another 4 hours later)

The Last Cry
A far future story where tumours are catching between a dead loved one and yourself. Just waiting for the cure. Words-in-themselves touch you more when the past is still built into them. One also needs to read ‘A Horse In Drifting Light’ and perhaps ‘Albert Ross’ to complement the experience. Nothing stands on its own. Like words, names can’t stand on their own: they need to be written or said. But stories, once read, can stand on their own or can be screwed up and remembered better for never being able to read it again. Crows are angels in disguise...or vice versa? My own loose thoughts on this amazingly haunting story. A city looks tidy by contrast with the protagonist’s flat’s messiness. At least there seems to be a hope there that the ambiance in ‘Empty Mouths’ has been exorcised. But Ted Hughes could never save anyone, let alone himself. Dreams of landfills. Then a countryside. A countryside lane still contains the same over-used safety-net as any city’s back-alley. But now it’s eating barbed wire. Not bars. (6 July 09 - another two hours later)

Every Form of Refuge
Love Lane’s work as I do, I think this is the story I love most (so far). It conveys the office life that I easily recognise, its random secrets (called by Allen Ashley ‘the apocryphal grapevine’), the astrological harmonics (including a ‘Blind Moon’ and the two balanced ‘planets’ of London and Birmingham in the fiction and fame ethos with echoes of Big Brother TV emotional politics), missing people, dimmer-switch identities, random coincidences, dark outcomes – it tells of a gay narrator watching a heterosexual couple’s difficulties of relationship when faced by life’s intractable ‘rush hour’ as unrelieved by any emotional flextime. Haunting moments of imputed nightmare as the involuntary, unconscious quest by the narrator to find some sense in the relationships around him actually meets nightmare head on as fed to him by the unstoppable onrush of emblems and symbols that life contains. Lies and truths. There are many memorable maxims in this story. I will not quote them here. One includes the phrase: “a way to change”. Go thee and seek these darksome maxims.
It seems cheating to angle for a catch of running leitmotifs in Lane as the pop groups’ names alone provide many a hook for my bait. (I’ve heard of Billy Joel, by the way). It’s just the book’s gestalt? That’s going to be difficult. I can see it before me. But to describe it to you is impossible so far. Why, indeed, the need to discover it? I wish I was someone else. (7 July 09)

The Hard Copy
Another Leamington story, welcome companion pages to ‘After The Flood’. Stories get lonely, too. Here there are more paper-cuts and another flood plus envisaged 'Power Cut' rooms surrounded by incriminating scraps of newspaper. When a child, put to bed too early on Summer evenings, I used to tweak and tease the bedsheet into imaginary towns and landscapes. Here the sheets are cumulatively used to form a safety-net for a memory. A mugging that was made into a work of art, then a touching relationship with its victim, then the memory trawled (photosynthesised?) into his fabricated life years later. We all become husks eventually. So why have regrets? That’s my question. Not necessarily this story’s. But if you read fiction for monsters or ghosts, then read Lane. But the slope of imagination needed for them to come to you for real may mean you need to meet them halfway. Cuttings gone almost opaquely brown with age (or wakingly dreamt incontinence?).
“Twilight reduced the trees along a steep avenue to iron silhouettes, like bars.” (7 July 09 - 4 hours later)

Face Down
Similar to finding the victim of the mugging in the previous story – but here the young male victim is evidently dead with face down in the canal (canals being places, I seem to recall, whence things can’t be dredged). Did the story protagonist imagine it – waste police time? As in ‘After the Flood’, we have a meticulous metaphor (of the recurring waterlogged body in this case) for the Internet, a metaphor which works for me throughout. Of course, I may be wrong. Only others can tell me what they think. Or have all the witnesses gone? It is unquestionably a most memorable and nightmarish piece, with this metaphor or not. And a mind-blowing ending.
“Yet what I saw wasn’t terrible.” (7 July 09 - another 2 and half hours later)

Tell the Difference
“But it was more a matter of having got used to the changes.”
The female protagonist (whose relationship with Jamie seems fitful at best) suffers from bouts of empathy sickness or witnessing-self deprivation. The book’s gestalt now stands before me, even as I speak, yet more clearly, but it is only with your own empathy that you will guess its true nature, as my power with words is insufficient to contain its image as well as to fathom Lane’s stories themselves to their bottom bone. This story tells of a jigsaw of a person depicted with the face missing. If you had empathy-sickness, would you seek out strangers to make it worse? I think not. But she does. And there are some scenes in this story that any sensitive reader will regret reading. Including the Ligottian visions at the end. Or are they primary Lanean images filtered through Ligotti back to Lane again?
“She wanted to hold an unblemished, unnamed body, without as much as a birthmark.” (7 July 09 - another 2 hours later)

Blue Train
“That was always the thing that got him with Coltrane: not just the innovatory technique, but the way his visions were rooted in an acceptance of what was in the past and could not be changed.”
Jane Austen never wrote about anything outside her experience, so her fiction only presented settings she knew and conversations between women, and women with men, but never men with men.
“...the drizzle of knowing that he would never emulate his influences: he could only mimic them.”
I will not attempt to critique this story. It is too beautiful for me to understand. It’s a sinuous jazz solo in text but overshadowed by a train that took people to settings they didn’t want to visit. Family that they didn’t choose as they once chose friends. Shades of fate in faith or colour. There are only a few stories in the world you can have inchoate experiences with as this one. Take five more stories...in due course.
“He didn’t trust the Internet. What was friendship worth if everyone was your friend, whether they knew you or not?” (7 July 09 - another 3 hours later)

The City of Love
To wake up this morning and read this piece as my first act was a strange experience. It tells of a male/female couple in Paris – to go clothes hunting or make a film? A trip to a cemetery? A fairground? Mixed with the woman’s ‘dreams’ of being lightly masked, more facelessnes, cinematic unreality...? So perhaps not dreams at all. Let’s put inverted commas around my first use of the word. Hey, just done it. Must get on with my day. This story will haunt me, make no mistake. Jazz in the morning makes coffee go down better. And invisible smoke.
“Belinda drank several glasses of water, though she wasn’t conscious of thirst."
Read also ‘The Witnesses Are Gone’ and ‘Tomb of the Janissaries’ to complement this experience. (8 July 09)

All Beauty Sleeps
“When I say ‘dreamt’ I am speaking literally, and you can fill in the rest of the picture for yourself.”
A felt autobiographical essay where growing up is threaded with the works of Poe and eventually a Gothic yearning to connect in some way death with the act of sex. The protagonist pays the price of watching Corman’s versions of the stories. When I watched them in the cinema in the Sixties they hadn’t yet become iconic. There are more bodies to be impossibly dredged from canals. A sense of identity only being possible by addressing death head on. Lane’s work is often about the loss of identity but I guess many readers of Lane regain their own identity by that act of reading it. A reader woken like the Sleeping Beauty. The rite of return via the allotments brings an ending where the text itself is death and wakes someone from within its print who plays himself and doesn’t depend on an actor to bring him to life. Fiction writers are so much more facilitators of living things than film directors or even midwives.
The eponymous women in Poe are like the planets of astrological harmonics.
In Lane, often there are scenes towards the end of stories where many quiet, hushed beings await the protagonist after his long fateful journey towards them. Coming to this book is very much like that. All these stories, (some read before, others not) quietly, facelessly, bending their heads at my approach and whispering together in the darkness, blending and merging into each other but without yielding their separateness. Indeed, their separateness is enhanced by the process of blending. (8 July 09 - seven hours later)

The Brand
For me a deeply textured prose poem, combining DH Lawrence and Angela Carter – not the dark maze of a Midlands City but, as in ‘The Last Cry’, the countryside Lane. It is also a Boyhood of Raleigh, a ‘wax painting’ (or palimpsest?) over parts of ‘Power Cut’. And minds protruding through faces like a dry puffballs, echoing earlier caster sugar masks...
Bodies left in a river this time, not in a canal,. Perhaps they’re more salvageable from rivers. A body in a Lake may be far more problematic for obvious reasons. There are rarely any seas in Lane (only floods). Perhaps that’s the Jane Austen syndrome?
A truly beautiful story. A ‘Nemonymity’ like Lane’s poem of that title? ‘The Drowned’ with the boys ungrown up? (8 July 09 - another three hours later)

Alouette
“The next night, I turned my phone off. But that felt wrong, as if I was playing dead.”
I feel I’m playing dead these recent years when I turn off the Internet.
Lane has here identified an extreme horror phobia of mine – a phone ringing in my house in the middle of the night.
This story tells of something beyond my experience: a mobile phone that shows moving pictures of the caller, and in this case, callers. And something called ‘happy slapping’. Nevertheless, this is a very effective horror story for me. And significant that the protagonist’s crisis takes place on a canal bridge. Self-immolation by technology? But he doesn't fall into the canal.
There’s much more to this story than that. Much more that allows the book’s gestalt still standing inchoately before me to accrete.
Lane --> Lake --> Lark. A pretty bird but a horrible sounding word. (9 July 09)

The Sleepers
“She was pointing out over the canal. ‘Look at the snow. Can you see? It looks like it’s full of faces...'”
The safety-Net of polemics or didacticism? Or a genuine artistic detached vision of the quiet, gathering faces that I mentioned earlier as softly climaxing many of Lane’s stories, now culminating the whole of this book? It is for me, a genuine protest demonstration of gathering forces: a summing up of the caster sugar masks or facelets that often thread this book. And it makes me think of things the way Lane wants me to think of them – for myself. It’s a detached vision. I suspect it was however very undetached when it was written, but I shall never know for certain.
I’ve often seen blizzards as being the swarms of the ghosts of killer bees. Here the quiet result of the blizzard, after the ‘flood’, is a frozen lake made artistic by sad sparkles and facets. Identities eventually made to look like a single entity: Superman’s home planet or a Cormanesque tarn in winter.
And talking of planets, the twin balanced forces of astrological harmonics I noted before in London and Birmingham now truly meet, with the countryside lanes between by-passed, as if with the click of a button on a mobile phone or on a computer keyboard.
I shall ever be stalked by gestalts and leitmotifs. There is no escape.
But a book review must end with the book itself. And it does. A book that’s more than itself. It’s a wonderful Horror symphony, at times dincopated and at others smooth. The Lark Descending. (9 July 09 - 90 minutes later)

NOTE: I shall eventually read Joel Lane's Foreword in the book for the first time after allowing its stories to softly take their course for a while longer without it.
END.

Written today (21 June 2009) and first published here.



They ended up not wanting to have names. A group of people who ripped off their unseen labels one by one. There needed to be an example set, however. Nobody would unname themselves without a lead to follow. A First Mover. The pre-emptive Clockmaker. If this were a story, the author would start with the example-setting character’s name – followed by a narrative of his rite-of-passage from name to namelessness. A tale of bravery and hardship, of a dimmer-switch controlling the light of identity, of those who failed to follow and remained named, of those who did follow and became unnamed. Yet to name the leading character as he was once named would be to jam the dimmer-switch by wedging in what it was trying to dim. The others who remained named would gain prominence by having real characters’ names in the story while the rest floundered about unidentified – not only confusing the pecking-orders within the plot but the plot itself. To call them by false names or even by letters like A, B, C would, no doubt, cloud the issue even further. Meanwhile, it’s good for any story’s author to relax and concentrate on the plot’s landscape, its spirit of place, before worrying about the entrance of characters,

The public park in Colchester, with Norman Castle, flower-neatened gardens, an empty bandstand, all eventually leading down grassy slopes towards a small boating-lake. Nobody has hired a boat today. It must be one of those times when everyone is asleep at home. The Longest Day of the year. Light at Night like the Land of the Midnight Sun. Even here in England’s Essex. The dimmer-switch of the Sun turned right up.

Without people, there can be no story to tell. But now, at first dimly seen, are tall dark shadows wandering around the Castle. They are the nameless Masters of Existence trying to form gradually into real people. They have been given no belief in the story-premise that all the real people are at home sleeping. Yet the Masters, so-called, remain only partly formed into what they had hoped to become since the story had given them no names other than as fictionalised Masters of Existence, no names on which to hang their identities. The story refused them any such luxury. So mere shadows (if slightly flesh-corrupted) they remained, ever-circling the Castle like forgotten druids. Masters of Existence who could not even master existence for themselves!

Suddenly, there appeared, on the margins of the boating-lake, the legendary Clockmaker whose clocks had hands but no numbers but, more often, numbers but no hands, because, with the former, one could at least guess the time they told. A real flesh-and-blood person. Taught by Masters, but lacking their ambition of existence, the Clockmaker actually succeeded in becoming what they had desired but failed to be. The Clockmaker knew that any ambition destroys the goal of that same ambition.

And now is time for waking. We are here, stretching, fully-formed, truly nameless, stirred by pre-alarmed timepieces within our minds but pure of heart and unconstrained by the deadlines of finding identities to wrap ourselves in. Owning identities simply because we didn’t want identities, the only pre-condition for identity being not to have one.

And the story can at last begin.