Four recent stories by COLIN INSOLE from different anthologies for my ‘Dessemination’ project here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/colin-insole/
When I read these stories my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
FILCHED BY TIME: ‘Woods of Sombre Fate’ published by Mount Abraxas Press
JULY: ‘On a Dark and Raging Sea’ published by Exile In The Margins
THE CIRCUS OF MISTER CHIVERS: ‘The Dusk’ published by Sidereal Press
THE REEDWAY: ‘Grotesqueries’ published by Zagava Press
JULY
“Memories of the mist persisted into the New Year with recurrent dreams and waking nightmares.”
This is a powerful vignette of covivid dreams from which we human beings, if not the animals with which we share this planet. are due never to be woken, with animals as prey and hunter colluding to defeat some climate disaster, a mist, not as thick as the peasoupers of the 1950s but more deadly, until we humans duly lie or die while reading about this July. We never woke. In denial of never waking. Seems somehow to ring true about things from my fast fading point of view. Only unknown strangely named species of animal seem to vanish, species philosophically unknown to us, that is — while the rest thrive on without us, I guess.
FILCHED BY TIME
“…as if the figure she had created had escaped from her story and was already out of control, wreaking its mischief in the fields and rivers. She had flinched a little from their questions – “
Filched or flinched from, this is an extremely rich panoply of rings of affinity between select youths and their mentors, through real German history from the 1930s to 1990s to our own age of panic at pandemic. First World War trenches to the fall of the wall. “The ghosts were impatient to be heard, eager to lure strangers into their territory to share their world” It is impossible to do justice to this work and its landscapes, as its massive word-richness seeps into old brains like mine and swells it beyond reading’s reach! The Night Walker, via a girl called Irma, filching and fetching unflinchingly for us extracts from real poetry, too, like Stefan George and A. E. Housman.
“Instead of God’s red blood, the pus of idols courses through your veins.”
THE CIRCUS OF MISTER CHIVERS
“Depicted was Wolan Grubb, author of the 1963 existential novel The Silence of Mister Pettifer, that had received more favourable reviews in some literary magazines than Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.”
It seems to be cheating as a reviewer to state that one could not do justice to a particular work. But again I am faced with this overwhelming predicament, to be faced thus with a highly redolent and rich-wordy work that seems to encompass all manner of things that I admire and fear in literature, a work that needs examining for its covivid dreams, its spanning, for an elderly Cathedral academic, an era of England from 1964 till now, a hyper-slow recurrent return of a circus and its ringleader all of which is essentially even beyond extreme nightmare, telling us what things and thoughts thread history and what we have lost or gained since Tudor times. A Zeno’s Paradox of time with junkyards, rat nests, fevers and rashes, nursery rhymelets, and a heady as well as substantive cross-section of our lack of grace. Including old sweet shops. And our blurring with animals. We are the performers in the ring. Folk Horror apotheosised. Grubbing the reader out. A truly great work even exceeding perhaps all of Colin Insole’s previous fiction, which already exceeds most others. You will not come out of this story the same as you went in
THE REEDWAY
Another unutterably powerful, timeless, story, and like its own deceiving house frontage between Isle of Wight and the mainland, it has been hidden in plain sight. I have at last discovered the path between, open only three hours at certain seasons, a land both empty of magic but paradoxically full of it, too, as the words are threaded with real history knowledge, as one walks one’s own path through, and speculates on feeling the alternating presence and absence of the surrounding civilisation. A message of a route that can only be passed on in quiet places like this, open for all, as long as they know how to risk such ventures through open-skied mazes and cellars, but nobody much will indeed open it. Replete with the atmosphere of the sea as I know it where I live, but even more so, complete with the whisperings from crab to crab. A solace and a pain. A consuming story otherwise, with named characters. But essentially a throeful portrait of a crossing that will last you till the very end.