Wednesday, July 22, 2020

We All Hear Stories In The Dark (4)

*

WE ALL HEAR STORIES IN THE DARK by Robert Shearman

Part Four of my review as continued from HERE.

When I read each story, my thoughts will be shown in the comment stream below….
Edit

One response to “*”

  1. nullimmortalis
    July 22, 2020 at 12:39 pm Edit
    …and after my mentioning ‘parthenogenesis’ in connection with the previous story…
    MUMMY’S LITTLE MIRACLE
    Likely to be the strangest story in the book, about a father’s attitude to his toddler daughter’s pregnancy, as aligned with the ‘Imp is Father to the Man’ story earlier in this book. A series of foetalities as a means to the second coming of the Messiah. Is it just me imagining it, or is this book, in my sequence of reading it, gradually and ineluctably becoming in truth more and more entrammelled by the presence of Jesus? A process almost beyond the book’s own volition?


    nullimmortalis
    July 22, 2020 at 1:55 pm Edit
    NIGHT OF THE MIGHT HAVE BEENS
    “…the umbilical cord that was coiled fat around his body like a cobra,…”
    Well, this seems, in timely fashion, to be a blend of the Unnatural Selection battles of the recent monogamy ark and the impish little miracle births as foetalities, just now, and, also, the baby dots and strung-up balloons of stunted and shrunk babies in the rest of the book so far. And there is also a father’s pride in a son, but which son? The battle of the shrinking and vying balloon sperms to reach the optimum heir’s egg. All striving to be the Chosen One. Here made a murderous nightmare of bodily-integrity diminuendo lived by a naive married couple, a couple with a baby monitor (a monitor of them as well as a communication device?) and the endgame heir is the one who thought breast feeding his mother somehow dirty?
    Well, this is an account of the story that might have been.
    The story, amid many other versions of itself, that reaches its intended reader, may be a quite a different story altogether.
    If your mind is shrunk or stunted, so is the story you read. So, suck it up, I say.
    2. nullimmortalis
      July 22, 2020 at 6:14 pm Edit
      NINE LETTERS ABOUT SPIT
      Nine letters from Etc. — a St Petersburg pet shop owner writing letters to Pavlov on the brink of the Russian Revolution. A pet owner who strives for business, one with a Daddy-Daughter reflex. 42F3D110-4BA4-4F47-8CE8-0A66468F0CB8Salivating or surviving, this tale as inferred from a one-sided letter-stream has defeated my spirit, and I feel more sadness at a story’s failure to connect with me than from its failure to connect, so far, with any other stories in this book and a sadness even more sad than any apparent failures of this pet shop owner himself, and his daughter who runs off to a circus with a contortionist. I feel no sadness at all for the dogs, though.
      Robert Shearman
      July 22, 2020 at 8:19 pm Edit
      To be fair, though, Des – it is very specifically a book about the order in which the stories are read. I spent over a year devising a maze so that all the stories left strange and even contradictory echoes with each other dependent on the multiple choices that are offered to you by the narrator – seriously, it was incredibly hard to do! Right from the word go the book has tried to be a series of paths where some stories are accepted and some are discarded, and it’s genuinely not a collection of random short stories. It is a series of options, and of roads never taken. Some tales are definitely excluded by your reading others.
      It’s your book, and your choice to read them in alphabetical order is entirely yours to make. (Though does deny the possibility of that ‘unique’ path formed by your reactions both for and against the tales, which means that it removes some of the personal element I was angling for!) . I don’t mean to seem defensive – writers should just shut up. but you did say you like it when we interact with what you write – but this was built very deliberately to be a mosaic, and your belief that reading in the stories in any random order is the same effect as the one I planned for such a long time, isn’t really true, I think.
      Not trying to criticise. Just engage. I’m thrilled you like so many of the stories in my odd book!

      nullimmortalis
      July 22, 2020 at 8:53 pm Edit
      Robert, That’s the most interesting authorial comment I have ever received since starting this project in 2008, a project based on the Intentional Fallacy (that I mentioned before) coupled with a fearless faith in fiction as the art of the preternatural. Sorry to have missed the point of your planned mosaic. I keep my powder dry till I finish reading the book that I am enjoying immensely.

      nullimmortalis
      July 23, 2020 at 8:08 am Edit
      6587C4C9-82B9-4203-AD08-6FA9EC914BA2OINK
      “And they pressed hand to trotter, and the spit mingled, Johnny’s spit, and the spit that was sort of Garth’s spit, and their brotherhood was sealed.”
      …spit as a blood oath, rather than salivation and mere survival. A story perhaps of salvation, not salivation, and an eventual regaining of this book’s “confidence” in life and ‘letting go’ … with thoughts of a youngster’s view of death at family funerals. This story, indeed, now presents me with the equivalent of a pet animal that I can love, instead of the curmudgeonly comments I have made so far about pets in this review! I am not all bad. And this is a charming story of anthropomorphism of human and animal relationships, rather than unnatural selection or brutal survival of the fittest on the monogamy ark. A boy, later a grown-up, and his piggy bank as durable and disposable companion. With broken mouth and stunted curlywurly tail. On adventures to the moon and Mars. A pig that drives and honks its car’s horn and works in a call centre. With a beige backstory. And a girl friend.
      This work reminds me of the spirit, if not spit, of a recent beautiful novel I read and reviewed by Mark Patrick Lynch HERE, and this mutual synergy is intended as a huge compliment to both that novel and to OINK. Any missing rubber bung, notwithstanding.

      nullimmortalis
      July 23, 2020 at 9:06 am Edit
      PAGE TURNER
      A page-turning story about a page turner of music scores. Probably my favourite Shearman so far, one that stands purely on its own as well as morphing into rich brown wood intrinsic to this holistic book’s thematic branches of massive physicality AS books and its ability to play music with words — my favourite story so far when taking all of it into account, a story of the pianist’s love affair with his instinctive sight reader of a page turner, of later atonal bass divorce of his ex-to-be, then marriage to the page turner, later of an atonal daughter acquired elsewhere soon to be tempered by Daddy, after a sense of Chopin having imbued the whole story, making me now dabble with Diabelli in my head, as Beethoven once did, towards a discord as a new wonderful Xenakis, I guess, a bodily disease as rebirth of what one needs to create with, and especially my scrying this story’s tantalising alternative endings, all of them potentially true, especially when being 101 years old in honour of this book. A story to postpone death for.
      Always one more page to turn.

      nullimmortalis
      July 23, 2020 at 12:46 pm Edit
      PECKISH
      “‘I haven’t gone mad,’ said Greta. ‘Or, if I am mad, I am as mad as I was before. I have just decided to stop pretending.’”
      A theme-and-variations upon the Hansel and Gretel story, but one with no track-and-trace breadcrumbs, nor even any apple cores as in the Dark Space story. This is where the kids really stay in that dark place, even though they grow up, and Gretel has become grandmother to the 16 year old girl in this story, to whom she tells – with any details of incestuous cannibalism dreaded or not – her life story. Grimmer than Grimm, more cartilaginous than Carter, this is a genuinely powerful tale of shaking off the ordinary and routine in life, and listening to this story for real, equivalent to being entrammelled by reading it. Chitterlings, loofahs and gingerbread men, included. I sense that the welcome extramural extraauthorial review entry above was not an entry at all, nor even an exit, but a fantasy brook of spells set to rill through this review, simply to prevent something or someone — what I had then just observed, in respect of Mummy’s Little Miracle, on the other side of the rilling brook, as the accretive ‘Jesus’ — to creep even further into this book’s reading. This story is darkness for its own sake as a purgative or rite of passage, with no such presence in it as a childhood angel let alone a religious icon?
      “We lay down to die, and we were resigned to it, we didn’t used to struggle so much against death as people do now.”

      nullimmortalis
      July 23, 2020 at 3:07 pm Edit
      PETTY VENGEANCE
      “I had stopped being a writer. I had become a critic.”
      Well, I know the feeling! Or sort of. At least I have not blighted someone’s writing career with a glib remark about a particular work being a “low-brow bore”, thus making someone’s entire life suddenly ‘times zero’…?
      [I myself, as an arguable version of this, have somehow merely (merely?) ended up possibly crashing the gears of a whole massive seminal work’s fundamental raison-d’être of its otherwise smoothly running machine of reactive reading devices!]
      Meanwhile, this PETTY VENGEANCE is a longish artful short story of traditional compelling qualities that I really could not put down. It tells of a playwright, then short story writer and creative writing teacher, who was indeed originally blighted by such a glib remark by a woman reviewer about his first play. You need to read the clever machinations of this plot, when twenty years later he meets the reviewer’s daughter as one of his students… I will try not to give anything away, but [POSSIBLE SPOILER] I discerned a fiction as ‘fantasy brook’ (similar to the one described in my previous entry above) rilling partway through this story, where truth merged, otherwise imperceptibly, into fiction regarding the past fate of the woman and the protagonist writer’s vengeance upon her living version, thus creating a great short story in itself possibly to restart his writing career….
      A very intriguing read. A short story to cherish.
      [The heading “Amanda Hadlett is a F***ing B***h” (my stars) — was this the forerunner of the Jason Zerrillo title in this book?]

        • nullimmortalis
          July 24, 2020 at 6:35 am Edit
          I’ve been thinking about earlier extramural considerations above –
          I could have read these stories in the order printed, which is my normal approach. Or in the spirit of this book choose a method like pulling titles out of a hat one by one as I read them or following the paths suggested by its intervening story notes. Those who know my reviews from the past will know I have always avoided reading any story notes, afterwords, introductions etc for reasons I have often given. My preternatural instinct, in the end, was to read them here in alpha order. Where I may have gone wrong was, having read the Prologue, not treating the intervening story notes as intrinsic part of the fictions themselves, for which, if true, I apologise. More thoughts from me when the whole book has been read.
          Reply
          • nullimmortalis
            July 24, 2020 at 7:08 am Edit
            …always TRIED to avoid…
          • Robert Shearman
            July 24, 2020 at 7:10 am Edit
            I honestly don’t think you should worry about it, Des. The way you are reading it is an experiment in itself, and the parallels you are finding of just as much interest as the ones I intended. The entitled story 50 – which stands outside the maze, and appears at first to berate the reader for finding it in the first place, comes to the conclusion that all my paths are a firm of tyranny. I think you have come this far – and have survived the process! Why not see it through and make of it what you will?
          • nullimmortalis
            July 24, 2020 at 7:16 am Edit
            I intend to do so, thanks Robert. I am not so much worried about this issue as very interested by it. For example, it is constructively ironic that you wrote this public comment on Facebook at the outset of my review:
            “ Wow! I won’t lie to you – the structure of the book was certainly influenced by the very particular way you draw parallels between stories across anthologies in your reviews – and thx freewheeling experiments in Nemonymous were an obvious inspiration. I hope the paths you follow (and break) don’t disappoint!”
            Your last sentence now seems very significant!

            Robert Shearman
            July 24, 2020 at 7:24 am Edit
            I was actually thinking yesterday that since the odds against anyone following the exact same path is dizzyingly high, the fact you offer your reviews in alphabetical order for easy access means that you very precisely don’t impose your order upon anyone else! They can make their own choices, and easily find what you thought of each tale, no matter the order you read them in – and that particular order is just as valid as theirs. It’s almost a public service…!
            Reply
      2. nullimmortalis
        July 24, 2020 at 8:02 am Edit
        THE PILLOW MENU
        “He said, ‘I love you.’
        ‘I love you, too,’ she said.
        It wasn’t something either said very often, and that was because they didn’t really need to.”
        A very touching story, that seems to turn a page in their life, if not in this book, certainly in this review as here insulated from connections elsewhere except, perhaps, for the connection entailing the current need for this couple to say I LOVE YOU. An ageing couple sent on a sort of second honeymoon to Gdańsk, Poland, as a present from their son George, as if he is the Princeling pillow from the story, they a royal couple in a queen size bed. A rainy time, compensated by the hotel’s pillow menu, a menu that is a joy to read and to feel each meaningful sheerness of the pillows and to leave this story’s own imprint in your head (instead of vice versa), as the couple’s own life defaulted to discover, so wonderfully, upon their returning home. Returning home, the goto of every loving poltergeist and pillowghost, I say. A sheer delight.
        July 24, 2020 at 8:12 am Edit
        Gdańsk once had a historic curfew or what we would now call lockdown.

        nullimmortalis
        July 24, 2020 at 12:18 pm Edit
        PLEASE ME
        “But the choice didn’t feel random, it felt instinctively correct.”
        “—there was some Chopin, some Schumann,…”
        “I lay there in the dark, and cuddled my pillow close,…”
        I predicted earlier to myself that in a book as big as this one by Shearman, we would eventually encounter a story that mentioned Schumann… and I was right. And a pillow to follow the pillows earlier today. And another instinctive choice that somehow felt right. I do not know whether it is the passion of the reading moment, but, flighty as I am, I now jilt any previous favourite Shearman story for this one. It is absolutely perfect. Those who read Shearman for the genre fantasies can be safely joined by the literary lushes, those, like me, who enjoy Thomas Mann novels, Poliakoff dramas, &c. This story of an aristocratic young girl, eager for her own due deflowering, and her relationship with a dwarfish pianist who plays Schumann in the lounge of a mountain hotel, the forced miscegenation mating between these two classes, while flanked by her collusive Nanny, and the pianist’s own toy boy as part of a ménage à quatre in her hotel room, creates a story that is quite beyond words. And the Purge that follows, seems almost righteous, a shriving of the reader as well as the characters. The ‘engineering of salvation’. And ‘chasing the dying days of summer…’ Dabbling with Diabelli.

        nullimmortalis
        July 24, 2020 at 6:42 pm Edit
        THE POPPING FIELDS
        “And the dog pops. Thank God it pops.”
        This is a substantive, complex work, complex, yes, but one that, relatively easily, reads with an engaging accessibility of event and emotion. Yet its visionary nature challenges my reviewing ability both to encompass it, and to explain it, a challenge more than any other story so far in this book, and it also challenges my levels of mind-blowingness, my capacity to actually bear its implications. And how it has weight upon on what I have said earlier about pet animals — as if this story has been waiting to pounce on me in this regard. Mind-blowing, indeed, and it’s another story of balloons, of animals now swollen by a man’s inflation of air, a story of this man and his teenage daughter Ruth (on the cusp of womanhood), living in a caravan that trails after this book’s circuses and clowns and other oddsters that tend to work in them. He bends pliable animals from balloons for kids who are otherwise visiting the circus, thus creating particular animals that these children choose, some animals simple, some more complex. And his weak bladder, swollen, too, no doubt, beyond its seating by the prostate, causes him to discover a release trapdoor in his caravan, leading down to the Popping Fields, a place you will never forget, especially if you are sensitive enough to the special nature of its colours, and the need for the animals that he created to be popped there by him, now wrinkled with some air expended, demonstrating an anti-Natalism of these children’s playthings…. And his Daddy-Daughter relationship is complex, too, and her eventual pregnancy from the boy she latches onto, a vision of all of these characters reaching their own pliability and bustability, body-blowing as well as in tune with your own mind swelling bigger and bigger just to encompass this story! The more you think of the story, the more it swells your mind. And so, perhaps, any reviewer of it is vulnerable to it more than someone who just reads it and then leaves it. But I don’t think anyone who starts this story will ever be able to REALLY let it go. Perhaps, if required, you will be able to avoid it altogether by following one of the author’s other paths in this book that actually does avoid it! As for me, I have indeed read it all, but I don’t think I have yet managed to get to the bottom of it, and thus, I think I am relatively free to disentangle myself from it till I re-read it in future years to come, something I am determined to do. I am not yet wrinkled enough.

        nullimmortalis
        July 25, 2020 at 8:37 am Edit
        ….straight on to a story with “balloons are popping”….
        PUMPKIN KIDS
        “And she battered her swollen belly with her fists, clawed at it with her nails as if to prise it open.”
        …and that quote, regarding this narrator boy’s mother, also seems associated with more “little miracles”, here little miracles with a degree of wilfulness, and with the swollen vein ballooning in her head when she is in a passion. A story that presents, beyond any previous firewall, the full resurrection in this book of Jesus, complete now with fleshy and bloody Eucharist as part of a Halloween cult of ‘chosen ones’, births of what I might call stoically doleful Big-Headed People, towards communally spiritual resurrections of the people’s personal dead ones in the church. And those people “take the noose.” Not knotting the ballon, but misknotting it towards implosion. Seriously, this book is an embarrassment of riches for me, and this story is just the latest example, full of visionary meaning, as it is, and set to last in my own big head for the rest of my life. It is, for me, along with much else in this book, a genuine literary epiphany. The story itself considers children born precisely on 31st October, not a minute sooner or later, by the local time zone. The narrator is someone who is just born on November 1st, and we follow his stoical development as a failed ‘chosen one’, his relationship with his parents, so movingly expressed, particularly his mother and her consequent abduction of a ‘real’ Pumpkin Kid, and the narrator’s attempt to become his dead ‘da’ and eventually, via this book’s ‘Child is Father of the Man’, his own self with inevitable pragmatism of Questionable acts. The creation of this story itself is perhaps an example of such a Questionable act. I hope my review and no doubt other readers’ reactions to it give the answer even before such a question even needs to be asked.
        1. nullimmortalis
          July 25, 2020 at 2:53 pm Edit
          C8B7ED57-F72D-453F-8C36-A9EF5F9C4C7C
          THE RAINMAN
          An archetypal fairy story feeling to me that it has existed since baby dot. A woodcutter with his own version of this book’s Daddy-Daughter syndrome, and a missing woman (another of this book’s lost wives?) whom he mumbles about under the breath of his cough, and amid his daughter’s fever in their forest’s lopdown, we gather much else about them. I do feel puckish about this story, particularly about her interim journey to the variably distanced city to become a businesswoman called Judith, the name she made up for herself from the woman’s name her father had mumbled. And later the daughter’s return to her father. As a sort of Missiah form of Jesus: “She opened her arms out wide, as if to conjure the snowflakes to do her bidding. She felt like an idiot.” She always sought for the eyes to be used. But what really affected me was the building of the snowman at the beginning of this story, a regular event, it appears, made for her younger self by her father from hard-dug appropriate forms of different snow substances. Then, with her earlier warmth of fever, before she left for the city beyond lopdown, he builds for her instead the eponymous Rainman from different forms of living raindrops, creating this Rainman with a deep-throat kiss reachable within it. I could go on and on about this relatively brief story…
        2. nullimmortalis
          July 25, 2020 at 4:10 pm Edit
          RUIN AT KNOSSOS
          A moving, yet hilarious, story of a stoical woman, who, along with her husband, had been encouraged abroad on holiday by their offspring, just like the earlier Pillow couple in this book. A story about saying what you mean, about the meaning of death, and the denying of death for a few moments of a long-married couple’s last farewell. Whatever the possibly dire scatological circumstances of such eschatology. No point in examining motives. Simply the need to stay in love, believing that death is not the nightmare it is made out to be, and trying to get back to younger times when once you called a loving spade a spade instead of simply a business to act out. A story I can easily imagine being read out on the radio in the middle of a Schumann concert on Radio 3 and stirring those who listen to it. And the author never really knows what effect their words succeeded in carrying into that aether. It just is. It just was.
        3. nullimmortalis
          July 26, 2020 at 7:31 am Edit
          SCHEHERAZADE’S LAST STORY
          “And every story can be your penultimate story,…”
          I am concerned anew about potentially crashing this book’s gears, yet it seems to be the optimum moment to relive Scheherazade’s backstory, her words once of “lychees and cream”, and now read of her second wind of creativity, her baby, the present nature of her marriage with the Sultan, her dreamlessness, her “pillows scented with rose water and honeysuckle”, her brain, if not her head, now feeling fat with story.
          “…so long as you keep changing your mind about when you’ll come to a halt.”

          nullimmortalis
          July 26, 2020 at 8:30 am Edit
          SEND ME TO HELL
          “I thought I had something once. I’ve forgotten what it was.”
          A forgotten raison d’être perhaps, if not a talent exactly. A suspenseful work. This teacher is tempted semi-masochistically by a card in a telephone box to be kissed to Hell. To avoid the Ruinman’s ‘death by euphemisms’ that his life has become? Or such an invitation making his brain so fat with potential story he simply cannot resist having it told? Probably both these things. But does it work? And is the name of the ‘lady’ in question with such an enticing message – Stacey James, Mary Leech or Alison Littlewood?
          2. nullimmortalis
            July 26, 2020 at 2:15 pm Edit
            THE SHADOW MOTHER
            “Of course I could see the difference between my father and the fathers of the friends at school. For Christ’s sake, my father was David Forbes! And their fathers were nobodies, posterity wouldn’t remember them, there wouldn’t be statues erected…”
            Another short story of traditional qualities, a work ensuring that I now know I am surely in the company of a short story writer increasingly equivalent to greats like William Trevor, V.S. Pritchett and Elizabeth Bowen. This is the substantive story of the son of a statesman, statueman, statuteman, a man as possibly forbidding as our memories of someone like Churchill (well, almost, as his father does have his picture on a twenty pound note!!) whereby this book’s gradual build-up heretofore of the famous Wordsworthian phrase about father and child — the one that I often quote when reviewing these stories — is now shattered like some of the statues have been in recent days in today’s world. It is a wonderful subtly emotional parallel plot of the son’s relationship with his mother who was always in the shadow of his father, the son’s own shed teeth and secrets between mother and son included, and of his relationship with a different woman as a young actress who is playing his mother as a young woman in a biopic of his father. There are many sorts of shadows here, alongside brief encounters. There are many ways this story could go, and there is a memorable meatloaf moment, too, but generally I cannot do justice to it and I beg you simply to read it, as a discrete story or as a story discreetly finding itself part of this skeinful of stories. Whichever method you choose, you will have at least read it.
          3. nullimmortalis
            July 27, 2020 at 7:43 am Edit
            SHAGGY DOG STORY
            “, he might even have drowned if enough snow had got into his mouth and melted.”
            I am not really qualified to comment on this story, as I have never read a Charlie Brown comic strip, but, by osmosis, I know this to be a clever story, one that has a touchingly happy romcom ending. Madalyn reminds me of the situation as the ‘bit’ actress, in the previous story above, another telling segue in my sequencing. She sadly does not even have the one-liner about meatloaf. But she becomes larger than life in this story masquerading as the dead Snoopy, echoing some of the “family pet” quandaries of this review and morphing anthropomorphisms in both directions of trans self-beliefs. The rich maskery of life. And I note that Charlie Brown has a “perfectly rounded head.” Good grief!

            2. nullimmortalis
              July 27, 2020 at 10:30 am Edit
              SHALT NOT
              Thou shalt not write disappointing stories about God becoming one of the lads in the pub. 
              Still, there is one good idea for today…
              “…the club was just wall to wall flesh, he hadn’t realised he’d created quite this many people, he began to wonder whether it’d be time soon for another cull.”
            3. nullimmortalis
              July 27, 2020 at 1:29 pm Edit
              3E81C0FE-39A7-4928-AEE4-4AB610F452B0
              SHELTER FROM THE STORM
              “, we could see that the earth was churning itself up, that the trees were being blasted hard into statues, or torn straight from the ground.”
              Sons and their Dadda facing a cold that was really cold – I was at secondary school during the worst of the worst in 1963 — so I really KNOW. And, where I live, cold is today a wimp, by comparison. A tale of a tale, almost as if it wants to heal the father-child syndrome so utterly shattered by the ice of the earlier statueman, the one with a shadow wife. A tale one son tells his Dadda who is now in his dotage but a tale they all shared experiencing when cold was really cold, a cold they called Old Man Kinne, and how Dadda sheltered them on that day when they went on a Tem fishing trip together. I won’t tell you the nature of the shelter that Dadda provides them as that would spoil this consumingly poignant story. My own recent still radiating, appropriately body-sited numbness that I mentioned before, now making this story even more powerful for me, whether big-headed or not. A tale that perfectly fits the breadth and breath of these wise-headed, physically wide-headed books.
              • nullimmortalis
                July 27, 2020 at 1:34 pm Edit
                Design above by David Rix in 2017.

                nullimmortalis
                July 27, 2020 at 2:53 pm Edit
                D21495CE-A770-4002-92DA-148FCA955642A SHORT HISTORY OF TALL BUILDINGS
                “First, of course, he would make his designs meticulous.”
                Meticulous seems to be the correct word where this process of construction of a skyscraper, in the newly towering up of New York, actually entailed that each brick met, ridiculously from beneath, the previously laid brick! But if you binge-read Shearman you begin to believe everything he writes. Your brain often alters in shape; sometimes your brain even seems to turn turtle. Another dynastic story of grandfather, father, and son, monuments and momentous moments, ambitions and agues, and it is a fine example of the Shearman art. And we really believe in the characters and their triumphs and setbacks, a work that starts with a black and white photo giving the only glimpse of humanity in the famous grandfather who had pioneered the skyscrapers of New York, till one day they started falling down one by one. His grandson tries to live up to his memory, but he cannot do so, but produces his own son who turns out to be challengingly harnessed to the constructions of the past within Shearman’s own construction of truly believable absurdisms. The building up of the previous story’s stoicism, here becomes a new “width and breadth” of constructive hopes and mitigations. Perhaps not a short history, after all, but an inspiringly tall story instead.
                “—but within the hour the second tower, just as tall as its twin, had destroyed itself as well.”
                (Part of design above is by David Rix in 2020)


              • nullimmortalis
                July 28, 2020 at 7:55 am Edit
                …and now again, going downward means the extra one is added at the bottom…
                THE SIXTEENTH STEP
                The narrator is a woman with a rogue of a husband, not all bad, but certainly a rogue, and they travel the seaside resorts to stay at bed and breakfast guest houses, wherefrom he always instigates leaving without paying… till they meet this flight of stairs, and the landlady who owns at least a slightly haunted guest house, and the story is a fine one about the two women’s relationship, the narrator’s pregnancy, and the nature of death, skin like sand, and a frisson of something extra I can’t quite define, nor nail down with stair-rods. The naive stoicism of reaping what you sow, with mistakes never quite wiped out. And a potential touch of mother-son relationship, and the would-have-been father-son one. Some wonderful character studies, with that extra step ever tagging you, however far your own steps take you.
                Reply



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