Literary Stalker
Darkness Visible 2017
A book by Roger Keen
When I read this, I anticipate conducting a real-time review in the comment stream below…
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
1.
“This book is a work of fiction – but what does that mean anyway? Who can say where the boundary between the real and the invented exactly lies? All novels have chunks of real life in them, some more than others. Well this one will have rather a lot more than others! Any resemblance between the characters depicted here and real people is not coincidental. And since everything is preordained anyway, there is no such thing as coincidence!”
I hope the author won’t mind me quoting the whole of the first paragraph as it seems seminal in my philosophical and literary thought patterns of gestalt real-time reviewing books over the years. Yet he MIGHT mind, I suppose. He may see ME as literary stalking, and part of what I DO do is just that, scrying literary and horror/SF genre texts for the inner or preternatural meanings in the book that the authors did not intend in accordance with the Intentional Fallacy — as well as to root out secrets about them that even they did not know about!
This story is about Nicholas as narrator writing about, well, shall I yet tell you? I do not want to be crucified for issuing plot spoilers.
I may indeed eke out this reading and parallel review of it, and leave any of my comments till I finish it. Or I may not.
It starts, though, with a very entertaining depiction of his own feisty relationship with his partner, their fallings-in and fallings-out in their Clifton home, a relationship that is convincingly empathisable.
“Robin is an ostentatiously camp hairdresser, almost a cliché really, and as if to hammer that point home, his body language sometimes borders on…”
Borders on what? Well, you shall see. But I do pity Robin’s profession in recent times. But love that passage’s link to Hammer Films, to which the title of this chapter refers.
“Great stuff!”
“I’m typing away and it’s all going very smoothly, fluently,…”
There’s a lot to swallow in chapter 2!
Whatever else you may say about it, it is VERY well-written.
“And so it went, fantasy after fantasy, each one propagating further excesses in the next,…”
I am being cagey. My review will mention all the great writing, and a style that could write a bestseller literary work. Nothing negative. This slick, word-perfect and accessible novel for those in the know about the worlds he is writing of; a writer’s writer out-writing even that, but is the world ready for this book?
Why cagey? Because I fear for my life, otherwise. Reviewers are stalked, too. It seeps with real threat disguised within playfully literary semantic syntax, as well as hilarity, filmic and horror-literary references galore. Bi-sex and bi-genre. But will it work? All the ingredients are ripe for book stardom. All the necessary skills are present. It just needs a tipping-point. Let’s trust this review is it. It’s almost beyond my controlling!
3 & 4 done and dusted.
From 2013:
The Hothouse and the Heuristic
Avoiding Reviewer Meltdowns
Weirdtongue PALAVER: started HERE almost exactly ten years ago today! — and with the later multiple comments HERE and elsewhere!
And comments here in 2013 HERE.
PS: If I do not appear again in this review’s real-time, please draw your own conclusions!
Whether a tipping-point or not.
I have now read more chapters, further into this often very enjoyable and once potentially great book, with its genuine promise of an even greater book that could have been written without the in-jokes or that will still be written by this author, but it would be unwise to delve too deeply into THIS extremely well-written book in a public review. Needs to be read fearlessly from scratch in private, especially if one is involved on-line with the packs of ambitious authors, publishers, editors, reviewers and other generally good eggs that mill about, often the same people in a permutation of these roles. Thank heaven that live conventions were halted when they were or pray for when they will be reopened so that we can all hug our sorries and/or congrats to each other. The few, the very few, who made it through the packs into genuine stardom included.
The bloody gun on the cover didn’t help!
END
PS: good to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the Weirdtongue Palaver with this review, and that palaver’s eventually fruitful learning process for me.
Thinking about it, that was probably why, a year or two ago, I accepted with equanimity someone’s action in getting the DF Lewis Wikipedia deleted while leaving the Nemonymous one still there!