The four new Nightjars…
NIGHTJAR PRESS 2023
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A Quadricunx
STOCK by Cynan Jones
DEATH COOKIES by Jean Sprackland
A SYMBOL OF A MEMORY by Jim Gibson
STYX by Will Eaves
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My previous reviews of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/nightjar-press/
When I read these works, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
5 thoughts on “Quadrilateral Thinking”
A SYMBOL OF A MEMORY by Jim Gibson
I was once sent as a boy on an errand for mince and dripping. And I also recognise the framing of stage plays or photos or paintings of real passing life. Wherever one is sitting.
I, too, have an understanding of most of my memories that happened in the past that I did not understand at the time. And some I shall never understand. And some I should have blocked out. Yet the memory of this protagonist is more powerful than most. It is shocking, recurrent and eventually somehow poetically self-destructive both to the person within the pages I just read and to the story itself. I wonder what sort of memory this unmissable reading experience will formulate in my mind in the future. A future that is far far shorter than the future when I was a boy. Having written this real-time review of it makes blocking it out almost impossible, I guess. Time will tell.
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My review of the fourth current Nightjar will be in the first comment below….
STOCK by Cynan Jones
“He used to think the sun rose because the birds called to it, sang it up.”
This is linking through a madman’s eyes, or a man turned mad by the entropy of the times in his Under Milk Wood enclave, with the diseases of ewes or of ourselves, Nan in a sheltered home with casters on her table, and him squinting through a telescope like a voyeur – at whom? His own car barely past the prattle, and other vehicles that seem to gurn. Or gun. All in staccato breaths of meaning by dint of sentences often shorter than others. And why does he wear balaclava, if not for highway robbery? Which brings me back to his linking, oxtail soup and oxtail bile when bursting ewe scabs, taking stock, sheep stock, and a gun stock. Paranoia. Police. Pineapples as tree cones or with puckered knuckles or upside down. And his toy human figures larger than the vehicles they use, a memory he uses when stopping other ‘toyish’ delivery vans for their tinned comestibles et al. Made me think of a toy town and the approaching disablement of self, failed my MOT but still managing to use or mis-use the body and the mind inside it. Reading this.
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/6-shorts-2013/#comment-13484
DEATH COOKIES by Jean Sprackland
“He came from country stock, was strong and hardworking, would split logs all afternoon whatever the weather.”
Possibly the most suspenseful, wrenching reading-experiences with referred pain of exquisite proportions via arguably joyful hysteria. Echoing the ewe stock in the previous story above, and a similar linking exegesis, the linking here of the wrenching pain and another wrenched van! And the whiskey needed to dull the writhing scrimmage of childbirth and induced anaesthetic clowning with the whisking down of a zip-pull, ‘Bisected’, it said. A ‘neat halving’ like the story’s defiant Zeno’s Paradox of an ending. After the equal defiance and deviance of snow and ice besetting the usually taciturn husband’s wild dream of a sheep farm. His ‘intimacy problem’ become the ultimate gelden intimacy of all.
Death Cookies, accepted or not.