GRIMSCRIBE PRESS 2023
Jon Padgett, Editor-In-Chief
Paula D. Ashe, Daniel Braum, Alex Jennings, Associate Editors
My previous reviews of this literary journal: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/vastarien/
Cover art by Jesse Peper, with internal illustrations by Peper, Carl Lavoie, and Karolina Choiński.
Written work by Romana Lockwood, Christi Nogle, Brian Evenson, Laura Cranehill, S.P. Miskowski, Tim Waggoner, Baphomet Tripp, Paula D. Ashe, Corey Farrenkopf, Jacob Derin, Marissa van Uden, Pamela Durgin, Karley Pardue, Richard Snowden-Leak, Ukata Edwardson, Andrew Koury, Christa Carmen, Patrick Hurley, Serena Jayne, Simon Lee-Price, Nadia Shammas, Shenoa Carroll-Bradd, Paul L. Bates, Dr. Raymond Thoss, Dejan Ognjanović.
Although I have retired from most reviewing after 15 years of doing it, I am keeping up with my regular independent relationships, such as with whole Vastariens, and with new single stories in anthologies and collections by writers whom I have reviewed before. Please keep me informed of the latter.
Who knows, I may one day come out of such retirement and start obsessively gestalt reviewing whole books again!
When I read this issue of Vastarien, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
Tenebrous Ramblings
by Romana Lockwood
I am able, by the adroit words, to empathise with the narrator as they audition for who ever is to be their carer. The last paragraph drops me in it, though, as this preamble
is somehow related to Hell knows what in the rest of this book!
[None of these folk ever existed!]
My previous reviews of this writerly nemonym : https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/romana-lockwood/ (‘Of her second marriage she does not speak.’)
Significant Dreamers of the Twenty-first Century: An Introduction
by Christi Nogle
This is amazing non-fiction whereby the internet has ended, well, in most places, and we collect and connect dreams along with the book-essayist and their wife, just as folklorists, in the older days, used to collect folk songs.
A delightfully accidental mix of two books that I recently reviewed as if predetermined by the power of the real-time gestalt: ABANDONED DENTAL CLINICS (here) in more dental ways than one and, less recently, INFINITY DREAMS in other ways (here) and not forgetting a Dream Archipelago and the AI-assisted Animal Imaginers to supplement my own recent forays into this area, and much more that forms our latter-day co-vivid dreaming.
My previous work on Christi Nogle’s own work here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/christi-nogle/ AND https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/5195-2/ (including aimages for this new work above.)
Tilberi
by Brian Evenson
Sometimes I expect something from a particular author’s story. And this assumption became a most significant false step here as Eva and her quasi rib-bone baby became a shifting collage in my mind. From such a bone hidden between this young woman’s breasts during communion via an older woman’s catheter to a thigh nipple for suckling, this work shocks as well as shocks even more. And then shocks again. And it seemed somehow inspiring, too, when I first realised that the letters of the real word as title contained a ‘riblet’, too!
Perhaps Eve should have been called EvA? As Evenson had it.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/brian-evenson/ AND a still shifting collage in his name here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/04/11/brian-evenson/
A fine poem entitled Saúde by Laura Cranehill dealing with the interconnections of sadness and happiness, followed by…
***
We’re All in This Together
by S. P. Miskowski
“And nobody says a word to the tenants? Like we had no connection to the managers, or like they were robots or something and nobody would care if they disappeared overnight.”
Can something be hilariously sinister? Well, this is! The interacting helpfully simple-minded and typically pent-up-with-rage output of various members of a Facebook group, this one comprising the posts to the forum of tenants in an apartment block, not talking to each other face to face (because of some form of lockdown?) complaining on the repercussions of the management workers being sacked upon whom the tenants depended. I won’t go into detail here but this is well worthy of such a writer who, with each new read of her work, I find growing in literary influence upon my mind.
My previous reviews of her stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/s-p-miskowski/ AND her management robot collage here is now updated: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2023/04/03/s-p-miskowski/
Faithful Friend and Companion
by Tim Waggoner
An ingeniously chilling vignette of a ‘you’ as witness that turns from vicarious to victim in one fell swoop of perhaps careful viciousness.
Pretty much symbolises all of us, I guess.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/tim-waggoner/ AND a bespoke Waggoner collage: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/07/19/tim-waggoner/
A long awaited Tripp to supplement Chodpa here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/black-static-29/
“‘Why am I here?’ Anything that could arrange the circus of synchronicity that’s brought me here…”
Creed of the Autophage
by Baph Tripp
“Annihilation as apotheosis.”
And now, after Chodpa, a prose piece that is the optimal exit from human existence by a new circus as a gore ouroboros of body-synchronicity toward God, a work that you simply won’t believe can exist in itself! Unless you read it. No justice to be done here, other than my expressing an accolade of it as a supplement to inverse GESTALT real-time reviewing, a process with execrable excrement as its lubrication, body part by body part.
Thank you for taking the time to read and record your response here – your impressions are much appreciated. Maybe I’ll take less than a decade for the next one.
Flesh, Porcelain, Steel
by Paula D. Ashe
“I can’t kill it. People have tried.”
This is a very effective, original and disturbing vignette of a factory explosion with its repercussions of ensuing blasted mechanical familiars that noisily ‘adopt’ people in the community where the factory was situated, without the silence of the outer areas where the narrator leaves for school, his mother dogged by one such inimical familiar.
I then thought of the silence of my AI helpers threatening to transpose themselves into such beasts….
Still There
by Corey Farrenkopf
“When it’s out there, online, it’s out there. I can’t take it back.”
A telling tale on the borderland of snuff and non-snuff art, viral on-line movie images and real life, photography and painting art, and arguably gallery art and the attenuation by suicide to an existence that AI art embraces like an on-line ghost of you that is ever ‘still there’? Involving characters with whom one can engage. Anxiously intriguing and inspiring.
Thought Experiment
by Jacob Derin
“I didn’t like the way my apartment looked from the outside. I couldn’t really tell
you why; I just didn’t like it.”
A straightforward account – ultimately experimental as concrete poetry – by means of a narrative by an unconfessed ‘philosophical zombie’ amid his own home backstory and exterior national politics of despair and the odd regular mass shooting, killings and self-killings alike or interwoven, I infer, a work that takes the thinking ugly ai-machine and man syndrome in the Ashe above, with a psychotherapy shrink and patient eventually in physical congress as well as by speech exchange, emptiness opening up as the preferred state, vast nothingness (vastarien) being the goal of us all, blindness simply a half-measure towards that goal, at last leading to an arty linguistic hoax pretending to be Ligottian – the most enviable emptiness of them all.
A Widow’s Field Guide to Fungi
by Marissa van Uden
Intensely tactile and collapsible fungi listed in evocative as well as business-like glossary of your widowhood and what fun guy made such a stage in your existence come about. By this means, you try to maintain a now hindsight synergy with a decomp species of spouse? Don’t forget to visit your sister.
I-90
Pamela Durgin
“She was at sea in the badlands.”
Watching things afire — not in a fire’s familiar hot places, as now — but in the snow. A young woman, written off by her parents and who give her her brother’s cast-off yellow truck to move her on, a truck that seems to hatch doppelgängers of itself on the road and in restroom car parks, a text crammed with horrors and a rite of passage’s hauntings, including travel sick, and I infer she comes to her own help but fails as all manipulating dopplegängers do. I reviewed only yesterday John Metcalfe’s The Bad Lands, and this Durgin, although more outlandishly right in my face, will, somehow or other, similarly linger, too. To be at sea is metaphorical and infers sickness, too. And Joe 90 was the last of the real marionettes.
…from the above yellow truck doppelgänger syndrome to a new refrain or incantation of something else yellow… and below in the next story something else yellow… and in the work below that!
The Customer is Always Lost
by Karley Pardue
“The yellow bag of cat food was eleven dollars cheaper.”
…being the refrain in question, a question of this woman with shopping list and a dead phone not destined to come again and again to a supermarket but to ‘stay’ as its employee. A disorientating story of amnesia, possibly a recurring dream from which she never wakes up. Nightmarish for any who read this and become tied to its rules of reader employment. I deliberately omitted reading a single paragraph so as not to be ‘lost’ and trapped by the work’s gestalt. But it has to be the right paragraph that you jump over. I must have been lucky.
***
Decadent Fears in The King in Yellow
by Richard Snowden-Leak
“‘I am a blank page in that book of great truths’”
An amazing, mind-fazing real-time truncated transcript of a streamed conversation, almost fiction, almost non-fiction, in kindred spirit with my own gestalt real-time reviewing processes that tread the same borderland, I guess. Even now, or especially now, with my AI art hangers-on. This article is supplied with many academic references and footnotes, one a coloured illustration of a ‘painting’.
PS: My own 2014 review of ‘The King In Yellow’ in its own comment stream here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/the-king-in-yellow-a-real-time-review/
More here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/6102-2/
From ‘yellow’ to ‘bellow’ in a fine disturbing poem-like text that fits neatly in with – but also offsets – much above ….
The Triumphant Bellow of the Room
by Ukata Edwardson
“to leak milk that floods the room”
The Voice from Nowhere
by Andrew Koury
“My elbow twitched, the skin and muscle gave a shudder. Who told it to do that? Who told my body anything?”
This tour de force (literally) as an epiphany of us all is a theatrical ventriloquist act by humans speaking voices through other people, with one gestalt mystic voice as tuner, all in the setting of a particular male “LGBT” (so-named by a walk-on part in this story) relationship.
This work is powerful, even shocking at times, and I am left dumbstruck. Not yet empowered enough to say more about its meaning.
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/08/02/vastarien-a-literary-journal-vol-2-no-2/#comment-16743
Cross-referenced the Koury with the ‘vent. therapy’ in RUBBY the next day after writing the above review.
Echoes of a Former You
by Christa Carmen
“Exclamation points abound.”
But tellingly and ironically few exclamation marks here, if any. Yet it’s fraught with a woman’s nightmare in her own home after the horror performed on her outside it — to describe which nightmare would ‘spoil’ it. Suffice to say, it’s a painfully heartfelt attritional journey of windows and doors in a world that is stitched with ligotti. A scream of pain in considered words made to seem to have an exclamation at the end of every sentence. A constant dilemma: to make a monster subsist by describing its ‘echoes’ or to purge it by silence? Perhaps, after all, I should have ‘spoilt’ it!
My previous review of this author: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/882-2/#comment-847
The Elephant in the Room
Patrick Hurley
A story that is its title, except it is much tinier. I raised an eyebrow as to why it is here at all. And now my computer won’t let me in via my face. I am left with a numerical aide-memoire to a manual password instead.
“…when only seventeen blindfolded men and women are left out of the 2,097,152…”
Wonky on the Inside
by Serena Jayne
“I zeroed in on his power tie. I coveted the fresh, oxygenated blood color for my sunset.”
I loved this work, especially as I once wrote about quite different things regarding eye floaters here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/02/37699/. I loved it, too, because I have been messing about fruitlessly in recent months with AI art, and here I am truly messed about in my mind with glorious real paint, real art, Van Gogh or cartoon, thick paint, and thin, craquelure and impasto and glaucoma, and migraine, and fear of eye tumours and doctor’s surgeries regarding my own fear of cancer both real wonky inside me and imaginary cancers, too, ands spiders inside the eye space, optic fuses seared, and all of this realure is couched within a relationship of two artists and their visuals, OCD hang-ups and eventual marriage ring of entropy. We all need to accept entropy in order to bring it closer so as to fight back at it hand to hand, face to face, in close enough quarters as the floaters in our eyes. That last bit may not exactly be in this story but it sure made me think about it!
Mr. Chester
by Simon Lee-Price
“It was during blue dark that Mr. Chester usually called.”
Sylwia and Chester …cartwheels hysterical sweetishly scrawliest. Which of them retches, which of them wails?
This story is all of such things or none … or partly both. Chest of drawers, chesty cough, the city of Chester that I have visited twice. Yet, above all and below none, this work IS a momentously straightforward terrifying tale of a boy with his protective mother then a story about him as a man in the large house and basement quarters, a loyal house cleaner called Sylwia, and a recurrent scary visitor called Mr Chester. YOU WILL NEVER FORGET THIS STORY. A gem for this book hidden in unplain sight among other great work.
The previous story above was said to be all things or none, leading to this theme and variation upon sin-eating…
It Tastes Like Ghosts
by Nadia Shammas
“Have you ever consumed something that hasn’t changed you, even for a little?”
This is a short dark rhapsody in re-enactment and bereavement, for a child or for what, my little pony, or your little pony? Eating and starting and swallowing and eventually choking in powerfully tactile description of it, not thus consuming everything but certain things, but you now try to eat everything once belonging to your ‘you’ as if a small step towards inevitable ghost and gestalt.
From it tastes like ghosts to it wears like them…
Grandfather’s Coat
by Shenoa Carroll-Bradd
“It was the brown tweed coat with the worn-through elbows… […] My arms swam in the tattered-elbow sleeves…”
This is certainly a creepy ghost story, short enough readily to to be read rather than be spoilt by reviewing what happens in it. A potential classic. If it fits, wear it. And it certainly fits me!
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/08/05/vastarien-literary-journal-vol-4-no-1/#comment-22708
If it fits, wear it. And it certainly fits me!
…ironically leads to:-
Quid Pro Quo
by Paul L. Bates
“…regular visitors to the house, those calculating vultures who circle the mire of our misery at a safe distance save for their occasional appearances meant to maintain the illusion of their indispensability.”
Some unknown crisis to be mitigated, as the narrator in distress arrives at a large Manor House , where roles are as slippery as the manor itself. Crossing Walter de La Mare stories with Thomas Ligotti’s, this plain well-written story is taken to further horror and sexual fantasy extremes, and you are meant never to forget Dr. Nohope and Atty. Gladhand. But I hope I do!
“I mustn’t let anyone else read this document, regardless of my reasons for composing it.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/paul-l-bates/
The Witch in the Dream House
by Dr. Raymond Thoss
Horror’s Bitter Pill: Pessimism in Lovecraft and Ligotti
by Dejan Ognjanović
***
This issue ends with these two substantive and mighty seminal works of non-fiction, or at least in one instance a vast personal transcendence of fiction as truth. This edition of Vastarien will ever be known for its fiction. It even exceeds itself with every volume.
But these two articles surely make this edition something else altogether, if not an apotheosis of nothing else.